The Art of Being Human- A Textbook for Cultural Anthropology, 2018a

The Art of
Being Human
First Edition
Michael Wesch

Michael Wesch
First Edition
Copyright © 2018 Michael Wesch
New Prairie Press,
Kansas State University Libraries
Manhattan, Kansas
Cover design by
Ashley Flowers
Electronic edition available online at http://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/20/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution NonCommercial-ShareAlike
4.0 International License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
ISBN-13: 978-1-944548-13-1
ii

The Art of Being Human
TO BABY GEORGE
For reminding me that
falling and failing
is fun and fascinating.
iii

Michael Wesch
iv

The Art of Being Human
FIRST EDITION
The following chapters were written to accompany the free and open
Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course available at ANTH101.com.
This book is designed as a loose framework for more and better chapters in
future editions. If you would like to share some work that you think would
be appropriate for the book, please contact the author at
mike.wesch@gmail.com.
v

Michael Wesch
vi

The Art of Being Human
Praise from students:
"Coming into this class I was not all that thrilled. Leaving this class, I almost cried because I
would miss it so much. Never in my life have I taken a class that helps you grow as much as I did
in this class."
"I learned more about everything and myself than in all my other courses combined."
"I was concerned this class would be off-putting but I needed the hours. It changed my views
drastically and made me think from a different point of view."
"It really had opened my eyes in seeing the world and the people around me differently."
"I enjoyed participating in all 10 challenges; they were true challenges for me and I am so thankful
to have gone out of my comfort zone, tried something new, and found others in this world."
"This class really pushed me outside my comfort zone and made me grow as a person."
"I expected to learn a lot about other people in this class but I ended up learning a lot about
myself, too."
"I came into this class with little understanding, and came out with a massive knowledge of the
world, and myself."
"This class allowed me to rethink who I am, what I am, and what I want to be by looking at
'who we are' as people."
"It changed my way of thinking about life, situations, and others around the world."
"This class is absolutely life changing."
vii

Michael Wesch
Ten Lessons / Ten Challenges
Lesson 1: Fieldwork
Questions, Connections, and Trying New Things
Challenge 1: Talking to Strangers
10
27
Lesson 2: Culture
The Art of Seeing
Growing Up Among the Nacirema
Challenge 2: Fieldwork of the Familiar
29
52
63
Lesson 3: Evolution
Who are we? Human Evolution
The (Un)Making of the Modern Body
Challenge 3: The 28 Day Challenge
65
86
105
Lesson 4: Language
The Power of Language
Challenge 4: Word-Weaving
107
129
Lesson 5: Infrastructure
Tools and Their Humans
Mediated Culture
Challenge 5: The UnThing Experiment
131
153
169
viii

The Art of Being Human
Lesson 6: Social Structure
Love in Four Cultures
Becoming Our Selves: Identity, Race, and Gender
Challenge 6: Get Uncomfortable
171
191
213
Lesson 7: Superstructure
Big Questions about Morality
The Dynamics of Culture
Religion and the Wisdom of the World
Challenge 7: The Other Encounter
215
237
251
271
Lesson 8: Globalization
How does the world work?
Challenge 8: Global Connections
273
305
Lesson 9: “The Good Life”
Creating “The Good Life”
The Power of Storytelling
Challenge 9: Meaning Making
307
320
335
Lesson 10: The Art of Being Human
There Are No Accidents: The Paul Farmer Story
If Paul Farmer is the Model, We’re Screwed Golden
Challenge 10: Write your Manifesto
337
347
357
ix

Michael Wesch
x

The Art of Being Human
DEAR STUDENT,
Welcome to anthropology.
If you're like me, you have no idea what you're in for. I didn't
even know what anthropology was when I first enrolled. Many
people have stepped into anthropology classes expecting to fulfill a
simple requirement by memorizing a few key words and regurgitating
them on the exams, only to find themselves radically shaken and
transformed by the experience.
One way to organize a book about anthropology – the study of
all humans in all times in all places – would be to tell the entire
human story, attempting to give equal space to each moment of our
history.
We might start the book 12,000 years ago, a time when everybody
everywhere was living in basically the same way, by foraging, hunting,
and fishing for food. If the book were roughly the size of the one
you're holding now, each page would cover about 50 years. The book
would begin with a description of our pre-agricultural ancestors,
1

Michael Wesch
people who lived in small bands with populations that rarely
exceeded 50 people. Somewhere around page 15, somebody plants
the first seeds, we start domesticating animals, and people start to
settle in larger, more stable villages.
But change is slow. Halfway through the book, we're still using
stone tools. Just past the middle of the book, writing emerges, along
with the domestication of the horse and the invention of carts and
chariots. The first empires emerge in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and
China. And in the next chapter the Greeks, Romans, Mayans, Aztecs,
and Ottomans take us to the brink of the final chapter.
With 10 pages left in the book (500 years in the past) you notice
that the book is almost over, and yet almost nothing of the world that
you know and take for granted exists. Most people have never
ventured more than 10 miles from home. College does not exist. The
United States does not exist. Most people would not be able to read
this book.
A flurry of activity ensues. Packed into those final pages are the
stories of European colonial empires spreading to touch nearly every
corner of the globe. The Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment,
the birth of nations, an ever more complex legalistic bureaucracy,
new concepts of the family and childhood, educational reforms, and
the idea of human rights emerge. With just four pages left the
Industrial Revolution appears, along with the rise of science,
medicine, and other new technologies.
The everyday lives of people in these last few pages are
fundamentally different than all those before. And not just because of
the technologies they use, but because of the questions they ask. For
the first time in human history, the average person has to continually
ask themselves three questions that almost no human in that long
history before has had to ask:
Who am I?
What am I going to do?
Am I going to make it?
2

The Art of Being Human
For almost all of human history, no one asked these questions,
because the answers were already known. We were who we were, we
would do what our parents did, and our future was not in our own
hands. Modernity brought with it a world of choices, and with
choices come questions and an obligation to answer them.
And the questions go far beyond ourselves, for the second-to-last
page signals an irresolvable climax. We build technologies that allow
us to send messages at the speed of light. Automobiles start taking us
faster and farther, dramatically changing the way we live and how we
build our cities. We even learn to fly. By the end of the page, we can
cross oceans in a matter of hours. But such progress is set against a
backdrop of two ghastly world wars that killed nearly 100 million
people. As you turn the final page, it must be apparent that this story
cannot possibly resolve itself and end well.
On the last page you find that humans are more prosperous than
ever, but there is a worrying and perplexing set of problems and
paradoxes emerging. For while the final few pages have brought us
tremendous technological advances and higher standards of living,
they haven't brought us more happiness. In fact, even though we are
more connected than ever, we feel less connected. We have more
power to do and be anything we desire, yet we feel more
disempowered. Our lives are saturated with the artifacts of an
absolute explosion of human creativity, and yet we struggle to find
meaning.
The last page also describes a world of unparalleled global
inequality and a precarious environmental situation. Our population
is more than 20 times what it was at the start of the chapter, but the
richest 225 humans on earth have more wealth than the poorest 2.5
billion people combined. Nearly one billion people make less than
$1/day. Humans produce more than enough food to feed everyone
in the world, yet hundreds of millions are starving, even as we
collectively spend over $1 trillion per year preparing to fight one
another.
3

Michael Wesch
The final pages describe how we created an astounding global
economy running on nonrenewable fossil fuels, but on the last page,
it becomes apparent that all those resources will be gone by the third
page of the epilogue. Furthermore, the use of these fuels has changed
the chemistry of our planet, leading to a rise in global temperature,
rising sea levels, expanding deserts, and more intense storms. Perhaps
most dramatic, it is in these final pages that we human beings have
attained the ability to literally end the book altogether and annihilate
ourselves. We might do it at the push of a button, launching a nuclear
war; or we might do it slowly and painfully, through environmental
collapse. Whether or not the story continues will largely be up to
choices we make.
Three new questions emerge:
Who are we?
What are we going to do?
Are we going to make it?
Anthropology is the discipline that attempts to answer these
questions about humans and their place in the world. By practicing
anthropology, you might just find a few answers to those other three
questions (Who am I? What am I going to do? Am I going to make it?) and
learn a little bit more about yourself and your own place in the world.
The answers to such questions might not be what you expect. In
fact, the answers to these questions will only open up new questions,
4

The Art of Being Human
and you will soon find yourself on a sort of quest, question after
question after question. Anthropology doesn't just seek to answer
questions; it leads us to discover new questions that we have not even
considered before.
You might, as I did, come to cherish these questions. Yes, they
will turn you inside out and upside down. You may spend a few
sleepless nights questioning your most basic ideas, ideals, values, and
beliefs. But you might also come to see these questions as great gifts
that reveal worlds and ideas you cannot yet imagine.
Anthropologists look for answers not just in books and data but
out in the world itself, by making connections with people across vast
cultural differences. This is a necessary part of understanding the
entirety of the human condition. We have to understand the diversity
that makes up the human experience.
It is experience itself that lies at the heart of anthropology.
Anthropology opens the doors of the world to you so that you can
experience more. In order to experience more, you will have to step
outside your comfort zone and experience difference. And when you have
experienced difference, you will be able to come back to more
familiar settings and experience differently. Why do we want to
experience more, experience difference, and experience differently?
Because our experiences become an integral part of who we are.
When we experience more, we can be more.
In sum, Anthropology is not only the science of human beings,
but also the art of asking questions, making connections, and trying
new things. These are the very practices that make us who we are as
human beings. Anthropology is the art of being human.
This art is not easy. You will have to overcome your fears, step
outside your comfort zone, and get comfortable with the
uncomfortable. "Anthropology requires strength, valor, and courage,"
Nancy Scheper-Hughes reminds us. "Pierre Bourdieu called
anthropology a combat sport, an extreme sport as well as a tough and
rigorous discipline. … It teaches students not to be afraid of getting
one's hands dirty, to get down in the dirt, and to commit yourself,
5

Michael Wesch
body and mind. Susan Sontag called anthropology a 'heroic'
profession."
What's the payoff for this heroic journey? If you're like me, you
will discover in anthropology new questions and new ideas. You will
try, as I did, to make them your own. But you can't own ideas. I did
not have the ideas; the ideas had me. They carried me across rivers of
doubt and uncertainty, where I found the light and life of places
forgotten. I climbed mountains of fear. I felt their jagged edges,
wiped their dust from my brow, and left my blood in their soil. There
is a struggle to be had, for sure. You may not find the meaning of
life, but you might just have the experience of being alive.
Above all, the art of being human takes practice. As such, I
present this book not as a typical textbook, full of bold-faced terms
for you to memorize and regurgitate on exams. There will be some of
that, as there are always new concepts and terms to learn as you step
into a new way of thinking. But above all, there will be a simple idea
at work: that anthropology is not just a science. It's a way of life, and
for most people, a new way of thinking that will open them up to
being the best human beings they can be. So we proceed in
recognition of that simple truth:
You cannot just think your way into a new way of living.
You have to live your way into a new way of thinking.
The course will proceed through ten lessons, representing the
Ten Big Ideas that you can learn by studying anthropology. Laid out
together in sequence, they read almost like a manifesto:
1. People are different. These differences represent the vast
range of human potential and possibility. Our
assumptions, beliefs, values, ideas, ideals – even our
abilities – are largely a product of our culture.
6

The Art of Being Human
2. We can respond to such differences with hate or
ignorance, or we can choose to open up to them and ask
questions we have never considered before.
3. When we open up to such questions, we put ourselves in
touch with our higher nature. It was asking questions,
making connections, and trying new things that brought
us down from the trees, and took us to the moon.
4. It is not easy to see our assumptions. Our most basic
assumptions are embedded in the basic elements of our
everyday lives (our language, our routines and habits, our
technologies).
5. "We create our tools and then our tools create us." 1
6. Most of what we take as "reality" is a cultural
construction ("real"-ized through our unseen,
unexamined assumptions of what is right, true, or
possible.)
7. We fail to examine our assumptions not just because they
are hard to see, but also because they are safe and
comfortable. They allow us to live with the flattering
illusion that "I am the center of the universe, and what
matters are my immediate needs and desires."
8. Our failure to move beyond such a view has led to the
tragedy of our times: that we are more connected than
ever, yet feel and act more disconnected.
1 Quote from John Culkin, 1967
7

Michael Wesch
9. Memorizing these ideas is easy. Living them takes a
lifetime of practice. Fortunately, the heroes of all time
have walked before us. They show us the path.
10. They show us that collectively, we make the world.
Understanding how we make the world – how it could be
made or understood differently – is the road toward
realizing our full human potential. It is the road to true
freedom.
Each lesson concludes with a challenge that will allow you to
"live your way" into this new way of thinking. You will talk to
strangers, do fieldwork, get comfortable with the uncomfortable, try
new things, break habits, reach out across great distances to discover
how you are connected to other people all over the planet, encounter
and come to appreciate people radically different from you, and
ultimately come back home to see yourself as a new kind of person, a
hero in your own way, ready to be the best human you can be.
You don't have to journey alone. Go to ANTH101.com and
share your challenges and progress with others. It's the perfect place
to ask questions, make connections, and try new things. It's a place to
practice the art of being human.
See you there,
Professor Wesch
8

The Art of Being Human
Lesson One
Fieldwork
People are different. These differences represent the vast range of
human potential and possibility. Our assumptions, beliefs, values,
ideas, ideals – even our abilities – are largely a product of our
cultures.
9

Michael Wesch
ASKING QUESTIONS,
MAKING CONNECTIONS,
AND TRYING NEW THINGS
About 20 years ago, I was sitting in a university lecture hall with
almost 500 other students waiting for our first lecture in
anthropology class. We all had our reasons for being there, and most
of them ended with the word "requirement." There was the "Social
Sciences 3 of 4" requirement, the "45 hours of General Electives"
requirement and the "60 hours at our university" requirement, among
many others. For me, it was the "International Overlay" requirement.
I had no idea what anthropology was or why it was required. All I
knew was what I had learned as I looked up "anthropology" in the
dictionary just before rushing off to class.
Anthropology, n. The study of all humans in all times in all places.
A smartly dressed, white-haired, bearded professor entered the
room and showed us what appeared to be a strange ink blot test on
the screen, asking us what we saw. We stared up at these apparently
random splatters of ink that we were supposed to decipher like
children looking for shapes in the clouds.
10

The Art of Being Human
I felt proud of myself when I recognized that the splatters were
the shapes of the continents and that we were looking at the world
upside down, to which the professor challenged, "Is it really upside
down? The world is a sphere. Who decided that north is up?" He
then showed us a map popular in Australia (McArthur's Universal
Corrective Map) with Australia standing proudly at the top and center
of the world. It struck me that this map was no less true than the one
I knew, which placed the United States and Europe standing proudly
at the top and center.
He then proceeded to convince us that it wasn't just the world
that we had upside down, it was bananas too. We had been peeling
them wrong our entire lives. Monkeys and many cultures on the
planet know that the best way to peel a banana is not from the stem,
but rather "upside down." Even the most stubborn banana opens
easily from this end, and you can then immediately throw away the
fibrous and inedible black tip and use the stem as a handle.
Then he turned our whole lives upside down, challenging our
most basic taken-for-granted assumptions in virtually all aspects of
our lives, moving from the economic realm and on to family, society,
politics, art, and religion. He challenged our views on success, love,
and even happiness. Ultimately, he would challenge us to consider
how even our most basic everyday activities – shopping, driving,
eating – are connected to all humans everywhere, and gave us
11

Michael Wesch
profound and unforgettable reminders of the impacts we might have
on others.
He framed the course around a very simple idea: that our beliefs,
values, ideas, ideals, and even our abilities are largely a product of our
cultures. He introduced three seemingly simple yet tremendously
powerful terms to help us explore this idea:
Ethnocentrism: holding one's own beliefs, values, ideas, ideals,
and assumptions to be the only true and proper ones. This is like a
prison for the mind. Until we could move past our ethnocentrism, we
would be trapped, with little opportunity to change and grow.
Cultural relativism: the antidote to ethnocentrism. This is the
idea that we must understand other people's ideas, ideals,
assumptions and beliefs relative to their own culture. We have to
suspend judgment and try to understand the world in their terms. 2
The beauty of this activity is that once we find our way into a
different perspective, we can then look back on our own culture with
new eyes.
Participant Observation: the hallmark method of anthropology.
We do not just observe other people in our attempts to understand
them. We join in. Only then can we move closer to their experience
and understand them with depth and detail.
While these may seem like nothing more than bold-faced terms in
a textbook, to be memorized and then forgotten, they were like firebombs
for my mind. They were a constant reminder that my hard-set
ideas about what was right, true, or possible might be wrong. It was
as if a curtain had been drawn back for me to look at the world for
2 This does not mean we withhold judgment forever and deny all judgement (which would
be "moral relativism"). We simply suspend our judgment so that we can understand them.
As Scott Atran, an anthropologist who studies terrorists such as ISIS notes, the key is to
"empathize with people, without always sympathizing." Empathy allows anthropologists to
understand others from their perspective, regardless of how reprehensible that perspective
might seem.
12

The Art of Being Human
the first time, and each of the thousands upon thousands of different
beliefs and practices visible there would be a challenge to my own.
I learned about cultures that challenged my perceived limits of
human potential. The Tarahumara of central Mexico can run over
400 miles without stopping. The Moken of Thailand can intentionally
control the pupils of their eyes to see more clearly underwater as they
dive for clams, while also willfully decreasing their heart rate so they
can hold their breath for five minutes or longer! The Inuit survive the
Arctic winter by tracking and killing seals under several feet of ice.
The !Kung of southern Africa find food and water in one of the
seemingly most desolate deserts on the planet. The Jenna Kuruba of
India start making friends with elephants from the time they are small
children, training them and eventually riding on their giant backs,
walking through life together as lifetime partners.
Anthropology can introduce you to cultures where fat is a mark
of health and beauty, or where beauty is not a prominent mark of
worth at all. Places where the body is an integrated part of who you
are, useful and functional in the world, not a thing to be obsessively
carving or pumped so that you can be swole, cut, ripped, or chiseled.
Some differences are cute. Others are disturbing. You might find
a place where dogs or horses are considered good eating, or where
pork and beef are forbidden.
It can transport you to places where people perform strange
superstitious rituals, only to discover that these rituals are
sophisticated ways of managing their culture and environment. For
example, the complex water temples of the Balinese, which have
managed water distribution across their rice terraces on the island for
over 1200 years—and recently came to the rescue and saved the
island from environmental collapse when new agricultural
technologies were introduced.
Anthropology introduces you to worlds without clocks or
calendars. Places where time is measured by the song of birds or the
pangs of a hungry stomach rather than the digits of a clock. Places
where there are no deadlines or jobs. No grades or schools. No laws,
13

Michael Wesch
lawyers, or judges. No politicians or rulers. Places where
smartphones, cars, and electricity are known but forbidden.
You can find differences that seem to cut to the very essence of
how we perceive the world. There are cultures where the locus of
thinking is believed not to be in the head, but somewhere near the
heart – or where the notion of "thinking" is not separated at all from
the notion of "feeling." There are cultures that believe there is not
just one soul, but several.
There are places where success is measured by how much you
give away, not by the size of your house or the cost of your car.
Places where winning isn't everything. Places where faith is about
being comfortable with the unknown, not with how firmly you
believe.
When anthropology is done right, none of these things strike you
as exotic oddities. Rather, they are exciting possibilities. They make
you reconsider your own taken-for-granted assumptions. They can
make you wonder: If there are humans in the world who can run over 400
miles without rest, or dilate their pupils under water, or hold their breath for five
minutes, or find food in an Arctic winter or desert summer … or make friends
with elephants … why can't I?
All this cultural diversity was new to me, and much of it was
cracking me open to examine parts of my world and worldview I had
never even seen before. The cracks reached deep into my everyday
life.
My girlfriend had just broken up with me. She was the first love
of my life, and at the time I was sure that she was "the one." Now
here was a guy presenting me with the idea that the very notion of
"the one" was nothing but a cultural construction unique to my
culture, time and place. He shared stories about cultures where one
man might have many wives ("polygyny") or where one woman
might have many husbands ("polyandry"). He shared stories about
cultures where marriage was not primarily about romance but about
more practical matters of subsistence and partnership. While we all
dutifully set about to memorize these new terms, I couldn't help but
14

The Art of Being Human
see that the very terms of my life were changing. A core ideal that
had been the central organizing principle of my life – the idea of "the
one" that I had to find to live a happy life, the idea that each one of
us might have a soulmate made just for us – was clearly not an idea
universally shared across cultures. It was an idea that was contingent
on a vast array of cultural and historical forces. The world, it seemed,
had a lot to teach me about love that I just didn't know yet.
The professor spoke softly and smoothly, as if unaware of the
fact that he was lobbing intellectual fire-bombs into the audience and
blowing minds. What on the one hand seemed like a bunch of simple
facts to be memorized for an exam carried much deeper and more
profound messages for me – that the world is not as it seems, that we
know the world only through our own cultural biases, that even the
little things matter, that taken together all the little things we do make
the world what it is, and that if we are willing to challenge ourselves,
truly understand others with empathy, and shed the comfort of our
familiar but sometimes blinding, binding, and taken-for-granted
assumptions, we can make the world a better place.
The idea that our most central ideas, ideals, beliefs and values are
culturally constructed was liberating. It was also terrifying. I found
myself struggling with questions I had never considered before. I
kept going to the professor with my questions, hoping for answers.
But he never offered any.
He just smiled.
Three years later I landed in Port Moresby, the capital city of
Papua New Guinea. It was as far from my small-town Nebraska
upbringing as I could imagine, both geographically and culturally. If I
wanted the answers to my questions … if I wanted to understand just
how different people could be … if I wanted to explore the vast
range of human potential and possibility … this seemed like the place
to be.
15

Michael Wesch
Port Moresby was once described by Paul Theroux as "one of the
most violent and decrepit towns on the face of the planet." It
frequently tops the Economic Intelligence Unit's annual survey as the
world's most unlivable city. There are the normal struggles of an
impoverished city: water rationing, intermittent electricity, lack of
sanitation, and rampant corruption. But what really sets it apart is its
crime rate. Foreign Policy named it one of five "murder capitals of the
world." Unemployment runs from 60-90%, and opportunistic crime
is a common way for people, even the most respectable people, to
make ends meet.
But none of this could dampen my young spirit. I was a twentythree-year-old
small-town boy from Nebraska, eager to explore the
world. Perhaps it was my small-town upbringing that had given me
this sense of faith and trust in other people. I had an unwavering
belief that there are good people everywhere. Open up to people and they
will open up to you, I thought. Every place on the planet has its charm,
and it can usually be found in the spirit of the people themselves. I
was looking forward to diving into the life of this busy little city. I left
the hotel on my first morning in the city with a full spirit and a fullyloaded
backpack, ready for an all-day adventure.
It was a calm and beautiful morning in the tropical paradise. Palm
trees slowly swayed above me in the morning breeze. The streets
were empty, except for two teenage boys walking my way. "Hey!
Moning!" they shouted.
What an exuberant and kind greeting, I thought.
They speak Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, a creole with words
drawn from English, German, Malay, Portuguese and several local
languages. Fortunately, about 80% of the words come from English,
so it is fairly easy to pick up for an English speaker.
"Moning! Moning!" I called back.
"Nogat! Moni! Moni!" one of the boys responded tersely, and the
two, now just 20 steps away, quickened their pace and approached
me with clear determination.
16

The Art of Being Human
I had misunderstood them, but I was clear on what they wanted
from me now: They wanted my money. I glanced to my left and right
and saw no hope of escape. Fences covered in razor wire crowded
the street on both sides, locking me in. Razor wire, I thought. Why
hadn't I noticed that before? It was an intimidating reminder of just how
dangerous this place might be.
I continued to try to win them over, still hoping that I could
transform this interaction into a polite inconsequential morning
ritual. Perhaps if I could just be charming enough, they would let me
pass; or if not charming, at least so naïve that they might take pity on
me. "Morning!" I replied even more cheerfully, walking confidently
toward them, and hopefully, right past them.
"Nogat! Moni! Moni!" he responded, slapping his pockets for
emphasis.
I thought maybe I could get by them with a little humor. I
pretended that I still didn't understand, and acted as if they were
teaching me proper pronunciation and the proper gestures that go
along with the greeting. "Moni!" I said cheerfully with my best and
broadest smile while I slapped my pockets with exuberance. I hoped
they might just laugh at the stupid foreigner and let me pass.
They did not think I was very funny. They blocked me, looking
angrier than ever.
"Moni!" the boy on the left said sternly, as he pulled back his
jacket to reveal a 24-inch machete.
I turned my back to them, hoping that if they struck me with the
machete the first slash would hit my oversized 40-pound backpack,
and I ran.
They must have paused for a moment, because I had 10 steps on
them before I could hear them coming. But I was no match for two
fit teenagers as my 40-pound pack bounced clumsily on my back.
They were closing in fast.
I came to a street corner and veered right. A large group of young
men turned to see me coming. In my moment of fear, I expected the
worst from them. Blood-red betel nut juice oozed from their lips.
17

Michael Wesch
Everything seemed to be in slow motion for me now. One of the
men spit his blood-red wad onto the pavement as the whole group
turned my way and scowled. I started wondering just how bad this
was going to get. I resigned myself to the attack that was to come,
and recalled that a friend of mine, also an anthropologist, had been
stabbed over 30 times in an attack in Port Moresby, and survived. I
wondered if I would be so lucky.
"Hey!" the men shouted toward me.
With razor wire on both sides of me, and a 24-inch machete in
pursuit, I had no choice but to keep running toward them. Two of
the young men seemed to lunge toward me with raised arms, ready to
strike.
And then it was over.
The two young men who appeared to be lunging for me were
lunging for the boys, protecting me, and had chased the perpetrators
into some nearby woods. The young men apologized profusely for
the behavior of the boys and welcomed me to their country.
In the years to come I would find great camaraderie,
conversation, and comfort hanging out with locals on street corners
like that one, but at the time I was in no mood for conversation. I
was shaken to my core.
I went straight to the airport.
I had no ticket, but I knew I wasn't staying in Port Moresby. I
stared up at the board labeled "Departures" and contemplated my
next move. Brisbane, at the top of the list, looked especially
appealing. Australia's legendary Gold Coast would offer surf, sand,
sun, and most importantly, safety. Below Brisbane was a long list of
small towns in New Guinea, a few of which I had heard about in my
anthropological readings.
A big part of me just wanted to go to Brisbane for a little taste of
home, security, and normalcy. But the answers to my questions
weren't going to be in Brisbane. They were going to be somewhere
down that list.
18

The Art of Being Human
And that's when I realized why my professor had been smiling. A
basic insight dawned upon me that would forever change my life:
Great questions will take you farther than you ever thought possible.
I hopped on the next plane to somewhere down that list. But of
course, the planes from a city like Port Moresby only land in slightly
smaller cities, with only slightly smaller crime problems, so I
immediately jumped on another plane to somewhere on a much
smaller list, and then again, until I was flying into a little grass airstrip
in the center of New Guinea where there was no electricity,
plumbing, roads, Internet, phone service, television, or any of the
other technologies that we take for granted as making up the basic
infrastructure of our lives. There was no hotel to check into and no
food to buy. My money would be no good. It was just what I had
been looking for.
There were a few familiar sights, even in this remote outpost. A
small and simple Baptist church, a two-room schoolhouse, and a
small medical aid post sat at the head of the airstrip, made mostly of
local materials and looking more- or-less like traditional houses but
topped with corrugated steel roofing.
And there was soccer.
People of all ages crowded onto the airstrip after the plane left,
whooping and hollering with joy as the ball sailed this way and that.
Well over 50 people were playing in this single game, while another
100 or so looked on. A young man approached me and started
talking to me in Tok Pisin. I was relieved to hear the language. I knew
enough to get by in it, and I was concerned that perhaps nobody
would speak it in a remote location like this. We soon found out that
we were the same age, 23, and we had one very important
complementary interest. He wanted to learn English, and I wanted to
learn his language. We were soon fast friends. I had an Aerobie flying
19

Michael Wesch
ring in my bag and we started tossing it around. Soon we were sailing
it down the airstrip and inventing a new game that was like a cross
between Soccer and Ultimate Frisbee. The Aerobie would soar
overhead as a sea of pursuers rushed after it collectively chanting
"Hoot! Hoot! Hoot!" a call that would become increasingly familiar and
endearing to me over the coming years.
He took me to his home that night, and over the coming days I
was quickly adopted into the family. Almost immediately they started
referring to me as kin, using words like "brother" and "tambu"
(which means "taboo" and is used between in-laws of similar age
such as my brothers' wives).
I immersed myself in their lives, craving the full experience of
what it was like to live and think as they did. I went with them to
their gardens and learned how they cleared the forest and then
burned it to create rich nutrients for the soil. I helped them harvest
their most important staple crops, like sweet potato, taro, and
bananas. I learned how to start and manage a fire, taking exquisite
care to not waste too much precious firewood while maintaining a
steady ember to light the next fire.
And when they offered me snake, of course I accepted. Our
neighbor had found the 15-foot snake in a nearby tree. It had recently
eaten a large rodent, so it was an easy catch, and came with the added
bonus that the rodent could be removed and cooked up as our
appetizer.
After a week of eating nothing but sweet potatoes and taro, the
snake tasted like an exquisitely buttered lobster in a five-star
restaurant. But as I ate, I couldn't help but notice that a snake like
that could probably crawl through any one of several holes in the hut.
Surely this snake has family, I thought, and they will be coming for us. I made
a mental note to seal myself up especially tight that night.
I was already in the practice of sealing myself up in my sleeping
bag every night, mostly to protect myself against the bugs and
rodents I would see scurrying around as we sat talking around the fire
every night. But it was the tropics, and we were sleeping by a fire.
20

The Art of Being Human
Inevitably I would get too hot, slip out of my covers, wake up to
something scurrying across my face, wipe it off, and cover myself up
again.
After eating a 15-foot snake found just a few feet from our
house, I was extra-vigilant. But it was no use. I woke up in the middle
of the night to find my worst nightmare.
I was outside of my sleeping bag, completely exposed to the
elements: And I could feel it, as thick as the one I had just eaten,
laying across my chest. It felt cold, heavy, and about four inches
thick. I couldn't see anything in the dark, but I managed to grab it
with my left hand and throw it off of me. Or, at least I tried to throw
it off of me. As I threw it, I went with it. I was wrapped up with this thing
somehow. I eventually managed to wrestle it to the ground and pin it
down with my left hand. I tried to free my right arm so I could pin it
down with two hands, but I just could not move my right arm. I
started to panic and scream.
And that's when I realized …
I had pinned down my own right arm.
My arm had just fallen asleep and had been resting across my
chest.
There was no snake.
This started an all-night cackle of laughter and richly entertaining
conversation about me. My language skills were not great. I couldn't
quite follow the conversation myself. The only word I could clearly
make out was "whiteman," which was invariably followed by a
collective laugh; gabbles of "hahahaha!" … and then all together in
unison, "Yeeeeeeeee!!!"
This is just one among many stories I could tell about my early
days in New Guinea. While they would all seem funny, you can't help
but recognize the signs of struggle. Such nightmares were just one
manifestation of the fears I struggled with every day. The food and
water scared me. The creatures scared me. The plants scared me. I
thought that at any moment I could taste or touch something that
might kill me, and the closest hospital was a seven-day trek over cold
21

Michael Wesch
and treacherous mountains. I felt uncomfortable and disoriented
most of the time.
The people were impossibly kind and welcoming, but I did not
trust them yet. I did not feel worthy of the warmth they offered. I felt
like a free-loader and a burden.
They organized a large dance for my enjoyment. It was an allnight
affair. The men wore their longest and most decorated penis
gourds, covered themselves in red ochre, painted magnificent designs
on their faces and strapped bird of paradise plumes to their heads.
Women wore grass skirts, carefully woven leg and arm bands, and
beaded necklaces. And they danced all night. It was surreal in how
magnificent it appeared—and how utterly bored and depressed I felt.
This should be a dream come true for any budding
anthropologist. I should have been joyfully decoding the rich
symbolism, but I just felt bored and confused. None of it made
sense, and I had no idea why they thought their dance was any good.
It was just a bunch of guys monotonously banging a drum as they
bobbed up and down, the women doing the same, back and forth, all
night long. Boring.
More than anything, I felt all alone. My language skills were not
good enough to have a real conversation, even with my brothers who
spoke Tok Pisin. Language was reduced to mostly practical matters.
Nobody really knew me. What we wear, how we stand, how we
walk, how we laugh, when we laugh, even a simple glance made in a
certain way can be expressions of our selves. But the meanings
associated with all of these expressions is continually worked out
within the never-ending dance we call culture. Step onto a new dance
floor, and not only do you feel lost, you might feel like you lost
yourself. My gestures, smiles, and glances were continuously
misconstrued. My jokes (clumsily delivered through broken words
and flailing gestures) fell flat. There seemed to be no way for me to
express to them who I really was.
We learned a term for all this in our anthropology textbook:
culture shock. Google defines it as "the feeling of disorientation
22

The Art of Being Human
experienced by someone who is suddenly subjected to an unfamiliar
culture." But it can be so much more than just "disorientation." For
me, it was a complete loss of self.
I fell into a deep depression. My worst moments were the
moments that should have been the best. A picturesque sunset would
not fill me with awe, but with a deep longing for the awe that I
should be feeling. Until that moment, I had always thought of my
"self" as something inside me that I had carefully shaped over the
years. I worked hard to be smart, funny, and kind, characteristics that
I valued. I thought of these traits as something inside me that I
projected outward.
What I discovered in New Guinea was that who we are is also
reflected back to us by the people around us. George Cooley called
this "the looking glass self." As he says, "I am not what I think I am
and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think that you think I
am." When I think that the people around me don't think I am smart,
funny, or kind, I start to internalize those judgments. And when I
thought the people around me in New Guinea did not know who I
was or what I was doing there, I found myself asking those same
questions. I didn't know who I was or what I was doing there.
I may have had great questions to pursue, but I did not feel safe
and comfortable enough to pursue them. I was not immersing myself
in their lives. And I wasn't learning anything. I rarely spoke. I was
protecting whatever was left of my fragile self. I was afraid that if I
tried to speak the local language that I would be mocked and seen as
the village idiot. So I stayed silent.
I was closing down and shutting out the world, counting the days
until the next plane might come and take me home. I made an
amendment to my earlier revelation about questions:
Questions may take you farther than you ever thought possible, but it won't
matter if you can't open up and connect with people when you get there
One morning in the depths of my depression, I was walking
along a mountain ridge with two of my "brothers" as the sun was
23

Michael Wesch
rising. From the ridge where we walked we had a breathtaking view
of the mountainous green landscape, the sun casting a beautiful
orange glow onto the peaks. We were just above the morning clouds,
and the green forested mountaintops looked like fluorescent islands
in a soft white sea. A crisp blue sky framed the peaceful idyllic vision.
I saw all these things, but I couldn't really experience them. I was
not well. I have always been a happy person. I've never suffered from
depression or even been hampered by a mild malaise. But here I was
viewing what had to be the most spectacular and wondrous vision I
had ever seen, and I was literally collapsing in sadness. My inability to
experience the beauty that I knew was right there in front of me
destroyed my spirit. My legs grew weak. I started to stumble. My
knees hit the ground. I knelt for a moment, and then simply
collapsed to the ground, crying.
My brothers came to my side. They had tears in their eyes. They
could not have known why I was crying, and yet there they were
crying right along with me. "Brother Mike," they asked, "Why are you
crying?"
All I could think about was home and my wife, so I said, "I miss
my wife."
They started laughing and laughing, tears still streaming down
their faces. "Oh, Mike!" they exclaimed, "we would never miss our
wives! But we miss our kids," they said, starting to cry again. They
shook their heads side to side while quickly tapping their tongues on
the roof of their mouths, a sound I would come to know as the
sound one makes when you are allowing the feelings of another to
become your own.
That cry was like the sweat that breaks a fever. I felt renewed
with a new joy for life. I immediately started to feel better. Something
about their show of empathy made me feel understood and known
for the first time in months. I felt like the word "brother" really
meant something, that they would stand by me no matter what, that
they would be willing to walk with me through the arduous learning
process of understanding their language and culture even as I
24

The Art of Being Human
stumbled along. My joy for life was back and I was living my dream
of diving into a cultural world radically different than the one in
which I had been raised.
I have never learned faster than in those coming months. My fear
was gone. I started playing with the local language, trying it out with
my brothers and friends. I didn't care that I sounded like a two-yearold
or the village idiot. Because soon I was sounding like a three-yearold,
and then a four-year-old.
That's when I learned the true meaning and power of participant
observation. I wasn't just learning to speak the language. As I opened
myself up to this new culture, it was as if the whole ethos of the
culture started to course through my veins. I could feel my whole
body re-arrange itself into their postures and habits. My back
loosened, my arms swung a little more freely, and my feet came alive,
feeling the terrain like an extra set of hands. I learned to walk with a
springy step over mountains I once had to crawl up and down. I
tuned my senses to see and understand the world as they did. I
learned to see the stories a plant could tell and to hear birds as clocks
and harbingers of what was to come. I learned the joy of growing
your own food, and of hunting, trapping, skinning, and feasting. I
learned the values of humility, calm and patience required to live in a
small community with people you have always known and will always
know. I learned to feel the cool wind coming down over the
mountain as a signal of the coming rain.
Some years later, another dance was arranged. This time, they did
not don their best penis gourds and headdresses. We did. I did not
feel like an imposter anymore. The dance did not feel like a
performance for me. It just seemed like something fun to do
together. As I started to drum and bounce along with them I
immediately noticed that something wasn't quite right. My tailfeather
wasn't bouncing, it just hung limply off my backside. Women were
pointing and laughing at me. Apparently, this dance that I originally
saw as simple and boring was more complex than I thought. My
brother pulled me aside and showed me how to "pop" by backside
25

Michael Wesch
up, making my tailfeather soar up and down. The ladies shrieked with
approval. Throughout the evening women flirtatiously pulled and
tugged on the bounding and bouncing tailfeathers of their favorite
dancers, and soon I saw people coupling up and disappearing into the
woods.
It would be easy to stand off to the side of this dance and try to
decipher some deep meaning for it, the men and women both
dressed as birds, moving this way and that way in an apparently
timeless tribal pattern. But on this night I saw meanings that could
not be deciphered from the outside. I saw meanings that could only
be understood by joining in the dance yourself. It was fun. It was
riddled with anticipation, excitement, and apprehension. My bachelor
friends were especially nervous, hoping to catch the eye of their latest
crush. Nervous laughter and teasing bounced around the open fire
when we took breaks from the dance. And having rested, the boys
would shake their tailfeathers ever more vigorously, hoping to win
the hearts of their favorite girls.
As we danced under the full moon I reflected on the true power
of those three terms at the heart of anthropology and how they had
changed my life. "Ethnocentrism" challenged me to ask questions
that ended up taking me halfway around the world. "Cultural
relativism" challenged me to make real connections with people, to
truly open up to them and understand the world from an entirely
different point of view. And "participant observation" challenged me
to try new things, to join the dance of this other culture, immersing
myself in a different way of life.
Asking questions, making connections, and trying new things are
the essence of this science of human beings. But I have found them
to be much more than that. They are also the foundation for being
the best human you can be.
26

The Art of Being Human
Challenge One: Talking to Strangers
Your first challenge is to approach a stranger and engage them in
"big talk" (as opposed to "small talk"). Hear their story and ask if you
can share it on Instagram with #anth101challenge1
Objective: Practice the anthropological mindset of asking questions,
making connections, and trying new things.
Capturing and telling the stories of humans in compelling ways is an
essential component of anthropology, and these days that means
mastering multiple forms of storytelling in multiple media
(photography, video, audio, as well as text).
But capturing a great story is not just capturing a good picture. You
will need to practice the art of anthropology – asking questions,
making connections, and trying new things. Try to move past "small
talk" and into "big talk." Ask big questions and offer your own
answers too.
Try to get in a positive mindset as you approach strangers, and let
that carry you through this challenge. Remember that people are
different, and these differences represent the vast range of human
potential and possibility.
Go to ANTH101.com/challenge1 for additional photo-taking tips
and "big talk" inspiration.
27

Michael Wesch
Lesson Two
Culture
You can respond to human differences with hate or ignorance, or you
can choose to open up to them and ask questions you have never
considered before.
28

The Art of Being Human
THE ART OF SEEING
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet
an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says,
"Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for
a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes,
"What the hell is water?" — David Foster Wallace
Culture is like water to us. We're so immersed in our own ideas
and assumptions that we can't see them. It can be useful to jump out
of the water now and then. This is one of the great virtues of
encountering someone or some place that is radically different from
what we know. We see the contrast between how we do things and
how they do things, and we can then see ourselves in a new light.
The art of seeing can be broken up into four parts. First, we have
to see our own seeing—that is, see how we see the world,
recognizing our own taken-for-granted assumptions, and be able to
set them aside. Second, we have to "see big," to see the larger
cultural, social, economic, historical, and
29

Michael Wesch
political forces that shape our everyday lives. Third, we have to "see
small," paying close attention to the smallest details and
understanding their significance. And finally, we have to "see it all,"
piecing all of this together to see how everything we can see interacts
from a holistic point of view.
Learning to see in this way is the essence of learning. As Neil
Postman points out, "The ability to learn turns out to be a function
of the extent to which one is capable of perception change. If a
student goes through four years of school and comes out 'seeing'
things in the way he did when he started … he learned nothing."
Mastering the art of seeing offers many benefits beyond just the
ability to learn. The most obvious benefit is that you become better at
building and maintaining relationships. Being able to see your own
seeing and set aside your assumptions, see big to see where another
person is coming from, and see small to truly understand them from
their point of view can help you through the most challenging of
relationship troubles. It can help you build better friendships, and
allow you to make more friends across boundaries rarely crossed.
But mastering the art of seeing offers something even more
profound. When you master the art of seeing you will never be bored.
You will see the strange in the familiar, and the familiar in the
strange. And you will have the ability to find significance in the most
mundane moments. As David Foster Wallace says, "if you really learn
how to pay attention … it will be in your power to experience a
crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only
meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the
stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down."
While his metaphor of a fish in water is useful, culture is different
from water in one very important way: it is not just the environment
around us. It is a part of us. It is the very thing that allows us to see
and notice things at all. We see the world through our culture.
Leaping out of the water doesn't just allow you to see your own
culture in a new light; it allows you to see your own seeing. And
30

The Art of Being Human
sometimes, even something that looks familiar on the surface might
be the source of a revealing difference.
SEEING YOUR OWN SEEING
Basketball arrived in my village just one year before me. Large
groups of all ages gathered every afternoon on a dirt court that had
been cleared of grass and pounded flat by nothing but bare human
feet. The backboards were slats of wood carved with axes from the
surrounding forest, and the rims were made of thick metal wire,
salvaged from some other project. They played every day until
sundown, the perfect end to a day of gardening and gathering
firewood. It was a welcome and familiar sight, and I eagerly joined in.
I stepped onto the court and noticed that for the first time in my
life, I was taller than everybody else. Even better, the rims had been
set to about 8 feet, perfect for dunking. I rushed in for a massive
dunk on my first opportunity, putting my team up 6-0. I looked to
my friend Kodenim for a high five, but he looked concerned or even
angry as he slapped his hand to his forearm as if to say, "Foul! Foul!"
I owned the court. I grabbed a steal and went in for another
dunk, looking to Kodenim again for a fist pump or cheer. Instead, he
gave me a stern look and pounded his bicep with his hand. He was
trying to send me a signal, but I wasn't getting it.
Later I would find out that he was trying to send me a not-sosubtle
reminder of the score. Rather than a "Base 10" counting
system (cycling 1-10 then starting again 11-20 and so on), the
villagers use a "Base 27" system and use their entire upper body to
count it. 1-5 are on the hand, 6-10 along the arm, 11 at the neck, 12 is
the ear, 13 the eye, 14 the nose, and then back down the other side.
6-0, Kodenim slaps his forearm. 8-0, he slaps his bicep.
It is a clever system that suits them well. There are no annual
seasons to track in Papua New Guinea, so the most relevant natural
cycle to track is not the path of the sun, but the path of the moon. A
hunter can start counting from the new moon and know that as the
count gets closer to his eyes (days 13, 14, and 15) he will be able to
31

Michael Wesch
see at night using the light of the full moon. Women can use it to
count the days until their next menstrual cycle.
I drifted into the background of the game as I tried to figure out
what was going on. The other team started scoring, tying the game at
14. "14-14!" the score keeper announced with jubilation, pointing to
his nose. Everybody cheered and walked off the court. Where's
everybody going? I thought. It's tied up. "Next basket wins!" I suggested.
Kodenim took me aside. "Mike, we like to end in a tie," he said, and
then he smiled the way you smile at a four-year-old who is just
learning the ways of the world, and gently recommended that I not
do any more dunking. "People might be jealous."
The story illustrates the power of different types of cultural
differences. Some differences, like the Base 27 counting system, are
intellectually interesting, but they do not threaten our core beliefs,
assumptions, or our moral sense of right and wrong. Such differences
are fun to consider and give us an emotionally easy way to play with
cultural differences and "see our own seeing."
Other differences, like the preference to end a game in a tie, are a
little more challenging, because they force us to recognize that many
of our core ideas and ideals are actually culturally constructed. They
take what seem to be obvious and natural ideas – like the idea that
sports are meant to be won or lost – and show that things need not
be this way. We can then ask new questions. Why do we value competition
while they do not? What advantages are there to favoring competition vs. favoring
a tie? What does this difference say about our society? What role has this
obsession with winning played in my own development? Would my life be better or
worse without the emphasis on winning?
And then there are differences that shake you to your core. They
are hard to see because they challenge your most foundational ideas,
ideals and values. They might make you question everything about
what you thought was right and wrong, real and unreal, possible and
impossible.
I was about to find out that the most interesting difference I
encountered on that basketball court that day was not the tie game or
32

The Art of Being Human
the interesting method of counting. It was that last thing Kodenim
said to me: "People might be jealous."
A few weeks later, Kodenim would fall ill and be fighting for his
life. His once-strong physique would wither until his arms and legs
looked like little more than a skeleton, while his stomach would
enlarge and become so distended that people would describe him as
"pregnant." He would put the blame for his illness on jealousy and
claim that someone – probably my adoptive father – was working
witchcraft on him. With lives and reputations on the line, it would
not be so easy to just put aside my own beliefs, ideals, and values or
"see my own seeing." I would need more tools, more ways of seeing.
SEEING BIG
A basic assumption that anthropologists make about culture is
that everything is connected. Culture is a complex system made up of
many different but interrelated elements. You cannot understand any
one part of a culture without understanding how it is related to other
parts in the cultural system. Understanding culture will ultimately
require that we take a holistic perspective. We have to practice
"seeing big."
Given the complexity of culture, it can be useful to have a model.
Anthropologists have devised many models and metaphors for
understanding culture. Many of them refer in some way to the idea
that culture can be divided into three levels: infrastructure, social
structure, and superstructure. Here we will use the "barrel model"
developed by anthropologist Harald Prins to demonstrate what these
levels refer to and how they are interrelated.
The model captures three key features of culture:
1. It is structured.
2. It is pervasive and present in all aspects of our lives,
from our economy to our worldview.
3. Each element of culture is integrated with the other
elements.
33

Michael Wesch
First, by using the word "structure," the model expands upon our
common-sense notions of culture. Most people tend to think of
culture as "the beliefs and practices of a group of people," but
this definition hides the ways in which the vast complex of beliefs
and practices in a group ultimately form into formidable
structures that shape our lives, just as wood and nails can be
joined into complex patterns to form the structure of a house or
building. We do not define a house as "wood and nails" because
it would tell us nothing about the form of those wood and nails.
In the same way, we cannot simply describe culture as "beliefs
and practices" because the long-term patterns of beliefs and practices
become as real and formidable as the walls of a house. They form a
structure that shapes our lives just as surely as wood and nails can
form a structure that shapes a room.
Cultural structures can be difficult to see, so there is often a sense
of "seeing beneath the surface of things" in order to understand why
we do the things that we do. This is an especially exciting part about
obtaining the ability to "see big." When we see big we are seeing big
34

The Art of Being Human
patterns and structures that are usually hidden from our everyday
consciousness.
It is like pulling back the curtain on the workings of the world or
cracking open the box of culture to see what really makes us tick. The
model then teases apart three different levels of structure, further
expanding our notion of culture beyond mere "beliefs and practices."
Culture can be divided into infrastructure, social structure, and
superstructure, or, in other words, our economy (technologies,
techniques, exchange & distribution systems); social organization
(social, political, and family structures); and our worldview (ideas,
ideals, beliefs and values).
The model demonstrates that culture permeates our lives, from
how we make a living (economy) to what we live for (our ideals and
values).
But perhaps the most important piece of the model is the double
arrows, which point to the fact that culture is integrated and dynamic.
Change one thing and you change them all. A shift in the
environment or a new technology can have profound effects on
social structure or worldview, and vice versa.
"Seeing big" takes practice. You cannot just memorize this model
and suddenly be a master of seeing big. Structure is hard to see, and
seeing the complex relationships between different levels of structure
can be even harder. Unlike simple math, when you try to understand
a culture, there is no point at which you will know beyond doubt that
you "have it right." But despite this uncertainty, it is absolutely
necessary.
Let's start our practice by using the barrel model to examine
American culture. We can begin by simply plugging in some simple
descriptions of American infrastructure, social structure and
superstructure.
Our infrastructure might be described as industrial or postindustrial
with a global capitalist economy. To survive, we each must
find a job, earn money, and then exchange this money for food and
35

Michael Wesch
other goods. Our exchanges are meant to be efficient and simple
exchanges of commodities.
Relationships are hidden or minimized. We usually have no idea
who grew our food, who packaged it, who delivered it, or even who
sold it to us. We certainly do not feel obligated to them in any way
once we have paid for the goods.
This shapes and is shaped by a worldview with a owerful sense of
independence and individualism. I earned my money. I bought these things.
They are mine now. Choices are abundant, and we can demonstrate to
others who we are by the choices we make.
We not only choose what we will eat, wear, or drive. We also
choose what jobs we will do, who we will marry, and where we will
live (mobility). Our political system further enshrines the value of
choice as we vote to choose who will represent us and make our
laws.
We value and nurture individualism in our schools when we give
out individual grades or champion a student's unique creativity. We
celebrate and elevate sports and movie stars for their unique
individual talents. We seek individual salvation or enlightenment. The
values of independence, individualism, choice and freedom permeate
36

The Art of Being Human
our lives, from infrastructure, to social structure, to
superstructure.We can try to tease apart the culture and find causal
relationships. Does capitalism cause individualism? Or does individualism
cause capitalism? Or more broadly, does infrastructure cause superstructure or vice
versa?
But the closer we look, the more we find these elements of
culture are so intimately connected that there is no way to pull them
apart. Instead of saying that one element shapes another, we often
say that one element "shapes and is shaped by" another.
Capitalism shapes and is shaped by individualism. Individualism
shapes and is shaped by the American political system. The American
labor market shapes and is shaped by individualism. This kind of
relationship is called "mutual constitution." Both elements are
"constituted" (made up of and made possible by) each other.
If our value on individualism waned, capitalism would change as
well. If capitalism changes, so do our individualistic values.
Now let's look at Nekalimin culture. A quick sketch of the key
elements of their culture plugged into the barrel model looks like this:
Let's do a quick tour of their land to see what this looks like in
reality. They live in a tropical mountain rainforest with rocky soils
37

Michael Wesch
and very little wild game. There is not enough game to support the
culture, so they cannot survive on hunting alone. The soil is rocky,
low in nutrients, and most of it is shaded by the forest canopy.
However, by cutting down the forest they let the sunshine in and
they can burn what they cut as a way of adding nutrients to the soil
for their taro, sweet potato, and bananas.
Here is a picture of my father in his garden that has recently been
cleared, burned and planted.
The nutrients from the burn will last about five years. After this,
the area must be left alone so the forest can regenerate for about 30
years and then be cleared and burned again.
One immediate impact of this gardening practice is on the size
and location of villages. A typical village has no more than 10 houses
and a total population ranging from about 30 to 80. Anything larger
requires longer and longer walks to access gardens and sources of
firewood. Villages also move about every 5-10 years as the nutrients
from a burned area are depleted and left to regenerate.
There are no markets or money exchanges. Food and goods are
shared and exchanged as gifts rather than bought and sold as
38

The Art of Being Human
commodities. When someone gives a gift, they do not expect
immediate payment. As I discovered, offering immediate cash
payment can be offensive, as it suggests that you are trying to end the
relationship and not have to remember them.
In this gift economy, it is the relationships that have lasting value,
not goods or money. People work hard to maintain strong
relationships because they know they can then call on them when
they are in need. There is no incentive to hoard goods, since most of
their goods (like sweet potatoes and bananas) would rot and wither
away.
As the nutrients of their current gardens are depleted, people
have to think about where they will make their next garden. This
gives them still more incentive to maintain good relationships. They
will have to make a claim on land and with no written records or
deeds of ownership, those claims will depend on a general consensus
that their claims are valid. These claims are made through clan
membership, which is flexible enough to allow people to move from
39

Michael Wesch
one clan area to another as long as their claims are recognized by
current clan members.
With such a strong emphasis on good relations, there is no need
for formal or written laws, rules or policies. There are no lawyers,
rulers, or police. All people have a natural incentive to be good and
to build and maintain good relationships with others because their
livelihood depends on it. Since nobody has any official power over
anyone else, and there is no division of labor, it is mostly an
egalitarian society, with very little difference in status and wealth.
So unlike the American worldview which is dominated by the
ideas and ideals of individualism and independence, the Nekalimin
worldview is dominated by a focus on relationships. This focus on
relationships dominates their consciousness and allows them to see
and think about the world in a very different way than we do. They
see and understand their connections and relationships to each other
and their land much more sharply. They are keenly conscientious and
aware of the complex relationships that link them to others and are
able to do extraordinarily complex relationship calculus as they try to
solve social problems. They believe in spirits of nature with whom
they must maintain strong relationships, offering small bits of pork to
the spirit of a grove or hillside in hopes that they will have good
health and a good harvest. They do not see themselves as individuals
separated from the world. They see themselves and their bodies as
intimately connected to other people and the world around them.
And they believe in witchcraft. As Kodenim grew ever more ill, a
shaman was called in to investigate. He went into a trance, the house
started shaking, and a small bundle of food, smaller than a golf ball,
fell in front of him, as if it had fallen from the spirit world and right
into our own. He picked it up and confirmed Kodenim's worst fears.
He had been bewitched.
The shaman explained that the small packet of food that came to
him in a trance was a piece of sweet potato that Kodenim had eaten.
It had been placed under the spiky roots of a pandanus fruit, which
was now causing his stomach pain and swelling. The shaman could
40

The Art of Being Human
not identify the witch, but suggested that Kodenim try to find out
who the witch might be, address the core problem between them in
order to heal the relationship, and ask the witch to stop. Every night
until he could solve this problem, the witches would be feasting on
his body, and he would continue to wither away and die.
Despite my growing capacities to "see big" and understand these
beliefs within a larger cultural context that places strong emphasis on
relationships, I simply could not go along with the idea that Kodenim
was being consumed by witches. I begged his family to let me take
him to a hospital on the next flight out, but Kodenim himself
refused. By his reckoning, his only chance of survival was to stay and
fix his relationships. As a compromise I took pictures of his swollen
belly and skeletal-thin limbs and attached them to a letter to a friend
of mine, a doctor at the Mayo Clinic specializing in tropical diseases.
Maybe he would know what was wrong and we could still save
Kodenim.
Meanwhile, I knew that I was failing as an anthropologist in my
efforts to truly "see" and understand my New Guinea friends.
Humans are meaning-makers. We make sense of the world. The
41

Michael Wesch
anthropologist has endless faith that no matter how odd or exotic a
belief might seem, it will make sense once all the details are laid out
and understood. For this, I would need yet another tool.
SEEING SMALL
Anthropologists are passionate connoisseurs of the little things.
We want to understand the blooming, buzzing complexity of life in
all of its nuance and detail. There are no details to small. Clifford
Geertz calls it "thick description," and in the seminal article of the
same name he famously spends several pages describing the many
meanings one might imply or infer from something as simple and
small as the wink of an eye. Our goal, as Geertz writes, is to see the
"Grand Realities" of "Power, Change, Faith, Oppression, Work,
Passion, Authority, Beauty, Violence, Love, and Prestige" in the give
and take detail and minutia of everyday life so as to "take the capital
letters off of them."
We must pay close attention not only to what is said, but also
who said it, how they said it, who they said it to, when, where, and if
at all possible to decipher, why. Long-term fieldwork of many
months or even several years is a must for this kind of seeing. It takes
time not only to learn the language but also to tune your senses and
start to see what matters and what does not.
Understanding a culture in its own terms (following the
foundational premise of cultural relativism) means that we must
understand all the details and nuance of their worldview. Just by
using the word "witchcraft" to translate their beliefs, we are already
putting them into our own terms. For us, witchcraft is a backwards
superstition standing against a more rational and scientific
understanding of the world. We associate it with beliefs wiped out by
the Enlightenment several hundred years ago.
The more I started paying attention to the little things, the more I
understood that these local beliefs that I was categorizing as
witchcraft were actually just one piece of a much larger, richer, and
more convincing worldview. I started noticing the care and concern
42

The Art of Being Human
given to analyzing each and every gift exchange. I noticed how each
gift was given along with a short and carefully delivered speech about
where the materials came from, who made it, who delivered it, and
who cared for it along the way. I noticed how they talked about such
gifts as "building a road" or "tying a string" between the two parties
so that they would always remember each other. And soon, this
careful attention to relationships and the gifts that bind them was
helping me understand why dunking a basketball or otherwise
showboating, or looking to crush your opponent, is not valued. I
started noticing a great deal of concern about jealousy and other
elements that could eat away at a relationship.
What eventually emerged from these close and careful
observations was an entirely different understanding of health and
well-being. They understand themselves to be physically made up of
their relationships. It starts from the basic recognition that the food
they eat becomes who they are. This is, of course, actually true. We
process the food we eat and its energy fuels our growth. For them,
every piece of food they ever consume from the time they are a small
child is a gift, and they are taught to know where it came from and all
of the people that helped bring it into their hands and into their
bodies.
The food was created through the hard work of others tending
the gardens and is itself made up of the nutrients of the earth. The
nutrients of the earth are in turn made up from the death and decay
of plants, animals, and their own ancestors. As they take in this food
it literally becomes them, and as the food itself is made up of the
relationships that made it, so their bodies are made up of the
relationships that made the food and brought it into their being. They
understand that every last element – every atom – of their body was
in one way or another given to them by their relationships. They
literally are their relationships.
It makes perfect sense, then, that when they get sick, they would
turn to an analysis of their relationships. From our Western
perspective, based on a model of the body as a separate individual,
43

Michael Wesch
we think that it is impossible that one body could magically harm
another body simply by willing harm and placing their food in a
bundle at the base of a pandanus tree. We call it "witchcraft." But if
you see yourself as actually made up of your relationships to others
and the land, it makes sense. So when Kodenim became ill, he and
his closest friends started analyzing his relationships, taking inventory
of all the times Kodenim had wronged another person. He had stolen
a pig from my father, so my father was at the top of the list. He had
also lied to Kenny, killed and eaten Ona's chicken, and had a strained
relationship with his in-laws, who were especially upset with him.
My father offered to wash Kodenim as a show of his innocence.
Washing is a ritual thought to "cool" the witchcraft. If my father was
the witch, the soap and water would cool his witchcraft and remove it
from Kodenim.
Kodenim knelt before my father as he stirred the water, and my
father began to wash him. He prayed as he washed, calling on God to
be his witness that he had no reason to harm Kodenim, that he loved
him, and that they were really just one family. He reminisced about
how Kodenim's father was like a brother to him, and that he had
always looked upon Kodenim like a son of his own. I swallowed hard
with emotion, knowing their history and the gravity of the situation,
and noticed that Kodenim's friends and family who were standing
nearby were also in a somber reflective mood, their eyes moist as
they held back their tears.
Kodenim's health did not improve. So a few days later, a much larger
ritual was arranged. Kenny (whom he had lied to) and Ona (he stole
her chicken), as well as all of my father's extended family, attended.
The event started with an open admission of the wrongs Kodenim
had done, followed by heartfelt statements of forgiveness forgiveness
from Kenny, Ona, and others he had wronged. Then Kodenim took
a seat on a log as dozens of people lined up to wash him. This time
there was no holding back the emotion of the moment. One by one,
those he had wronged as well as their extended families moistened
their hands and washed his head, often saying a prayer of care and
44

The Art of Being Human
forgiveness as they did this. Kodenim looked especially ill. People
lingered long after the ritual, like they didn't want to let Kodenim or
this special moment go.
45

Michael Wesch
The next day, the plane came in with news from my friend at the
Mayo Clinic. He said that they would need to do blood tests to find
out more, but even then he was not confident that anything could be
done. He recommended staying in the village.
Kodenim died two days later.
The aftermath was difficult. Kodenim's family was hurt and
angry, as we all were, and came to my father asking for
compensation. They wanted a huge amount of wealth by local
standards – several bushknives, two axes, clothes, bags, bows and
arrows. Altogether, their request was many times the wealth of any
single individual.
The request deeply offended and angered me. It challenged my
most fundamental understandings of justice. Kodenim had stolen a
pig from my father, causing a rift in the relationship. His family was
sure it was this that had killed him. Maybe my father did not work the
witchcraft himself, but he should have been looking after him more
carefully, especially since Kodenim lived in the same village as my
father. On my scales of justice, we were the ones who were wronged,
and we were the ones who deserved payment. Kodenim had stolen
from us, not the other way around.
I felt lost and confused, and tried to drift into the background
and grieve Kodenim's death in my own way. I started spending more
time alone, and when I was around other people, I always brought
my camera and just hid behind the viewfinder. In this way, I could
pretend to be doing "work" and hope to not be bothered, but my
father called my bluff. "My son," he said, looking into the camera,
"why don't you use that thing to show them I am not a witch!" and
then gave a hearty laugh. He liked to play the "stupid old man" who
didn't understand these new technologies like cameras, but he knew
perfectly well that my camera could not exonerate him. He just
46

The Art of Being Human
wanted me to stop hiding. I realized something very important in that
moment:
Participation is not a choice.
Only how we participate is a choice.
Sitting back and doing nothing is in itself a form of participation.
You can't pretend like your actions do not matter and stand off to
the side of social life.
But what to do? I did not want to contribute to the compensation
as I was being asked to do. I would need to finally put it all together
and practice the full art of seeing.
SEEING IT ALL
No matter how good you get at seeing your own seeing, seeing
big, and seeing small, you can never really see the world as they see it.
You can't "go native" and be just like them. Despite my best efforts, I
could not really bring myself to believe that Kodenim had been killed
by witchcraft, and that the death could have been avoided if my
father had nurtured a healthier relationship with him.
"Being true to yourself" is an equally troublesome strategy. If you
simply stick to your own ideas, ideals, beliefs, and values, then you
are refusing to learn and grow. You fail to nurture any true empathy
and understanding.
What is needed is some method that can be practiced day in and
day out that slowly moves us closer and closer toward understanding.
It has to be something we can remember when times get hard,
something that can keep us on track even when our own feelings,
emotions, fears, and biases start clouding our vision.
It was during hard times like these that I turned to the most
important tools in the anthropologist's toolkit: Communication,
Empathy, and Thoughtfulness. We have to keep talking to people
(communication), work toward understanding them in their own
terms (empathy), using and revising our knowledge and models as we
47

Michael Wesch
go (thoughtfulness). As we improve in each one of these areas, the
others improve as well. Communicating helps us understand their
perspective (empathy) and revise our analytical models
(thoughtfulness).
As our empathy improves, we can communicate better and
improve our thoughtfulness, and as our thoughtfulness improves we
are better able to imagine our way into their perspective (empathy)
and communicate more clearly with them. We can summarize these
relationships like this:
Seeing small had allowed me to understand their logic. Seeing big
allowed me to see how this logic fit in with other elements of their
culture. The more I communicated, empathized, and thought
through the matter, the more I started to understand – not as an
academic studying the matter, but as a human being deeply enmeshed
in the matter myself. From that insider perspective, I now realized
that witchcraft beliefs were an integral part of a much larger system
that had remained hidden until then.
What was apparent as an insider was that our choice to pay or not
pay the compensation would have life and death consequences for
the village. We could pay the compensation, thereby reconnecting
two family networks and saving the village, or we could simply
choose to move out and start a new village. It turns out that
witchcraft, more than the depletion of nutrients in the soil, is the
engine that keeps people moving. Most villages trace their origin to a
witchcraft accusation. If you stand on a high peak and look at the
villages dotting the landscape, you are looking at a history of
accusations, deaths, and failed compensations.
48

The Art of Being Human
Most villages are made up of no more than a handful of families.
When someone gets sick or dies, they analyze their relationships to
find a strained relation. Usually one of the most strained relationships
is between two families within the village. In this case, Kodenim's
family blames my family. When Kodenim died, it was not just
Kodenim that died. Kodenim, like anyone else in the culture, is also
seen as a node in a vast network of relations. His death leaves a vast
void in the network that must be repaired, or it threatens to tear apart
the fabric of the society. Large compensation gifts can repair this
void by reconnecting the extended families and networks that
Kodenim once connected.
The entire model of culture we laid out earlier now makes sense
in a whole new way. "Witchcraft" is not just this strange belief. It is
an integral part of their entire culture.
"Witchcraft" makes sense at every level of culture. First, at the
level of superstructure we can say that it is logical in that it makes
sense within a sound and logically consistent worldview that focuses
on relationships. Furthermore, witchcraft is generally called upon to
explain why someone is sick, not how. Many people can offer
sophisticated biomedical explanations for how someone died, but
this only explains how; it does not explain why this particular person
died at this particular time. Nobody has an answer for "the big Why"
of death. Many in the West turn to explanations such as "it was
God's will" or it was just "bad luck." These are no more scientifically
verifiable than witchcraft.
Second, at the level of social structure, we can say that it is sociological.
It makes sense socially. Witchcraft beliefs encourage people
to be kind to each other and take care of their relationships in the
absence of formal rules and laws. Furthermore, if a relationship does
sour, there are rituals such as the washings described earlier that heal
relationships.
And finally, at the level of infrastructure, we can say that
witchcraft beliefs are ecological. They make sense for the
environment. As villages grow to over fifty people, they tend to break
49

Michael Wesch
up and split apart due to witchcraft accusations. This is ecologically
sound, because it keeps people spread out and well within the total
carrying capacity of their land. Rather than suffering massive
ecological collapse and starvation during a drought, their low
population density spread over many miles of land is sustained even
through hard times.
Being able to truly see and understand this put me at ease. I now
realized that my contribution to the compensation would heal the
relationships of a village I had come to deeply love and care about.
The size of the gift forced my father to call in debts of friends and
friends of friends, his whole network of relations. The gift was large
not only as a sign of respect and love for Kodenim and his family, it
also assured us that they would never forget us and that they would
one day give something in return. These gifts would make their way
back through the vast network we had to call upon to bring this gift
together. Still more gifts would then be given in return, and so on.
We were retying the ties that once bound us together, filling the void
left by Kodenim's departure.
The gifts were set out at the center of the village early one
morning. Kodenim's father led his entire extended family down the
path and into the village to collect the bounty. There had been much
strain in these relationships ever since Kodenim first stole my father's
pig. Kodenim's father examined the pile of gifts that had been
brought forth. All the wealth in the world cannot replace a son, and
no father wants to bury their child. But the sentiment was strong and
well- received. He thanked my father and they extended hands for a
handshake, tears in their eyes. The handshake soon collapsed into a
hug which others joined in on, while others clapped and cried.
My own spirit was still aching from the loss of Kodenim. But as I
watched the tears flow down the cheeks of my father, Kodenim's
father, and the others who had gathered for that hug, I realized
something that filled my soul with gratitude and peace:
This was a beautiful death.
50

The Art of Being Human
In his final days, Kodenim was able to publicly admit his every
sin. He was offered heartfelt forgiveness from those who he had
wronged, all because of their beliefs in witchcraft. It may not have
cleared his body of whatever it was that killed him, but it sure seemed
to cleanse his soul. He died at peace.
And the hole he left in our world was filled with gifts, kindness,
and good will.
51

Michael Wesch
GROWING UP AMONG THE NACIREMA
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to
arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
–T. S. Eliot
If viewing an exotic and very different culture can help us leap
out of the water of our own culture to truly see it, the Nacirema need
to be high on our list of cultures to examine. In 1956, cultural
anthropologist Horace Miner's original article about the Nacirema
provided an in-depth look at their ritual behaviors that show, in
Miner's words, "the extremes to which human behavior can go." The
work was so shocking and revealing that the article went on to be the
most widely read article in the history of Anthropology.
As Miner explains in the article, the Nacirema are obsessed with
the body, which they believe is intrinsically ugly and prone to debility
and disease. Each Nacirema household has a shrine or sometimes
several shrines in which private rituals are performed to mitigate what
they see as ever-present and pervasive threats to their bodies. Various
52

The Art of Being Human
charms provided by medicine men are ingested, and they perform
several rites of ablution throughout the day using a special purified
water secured from the main Water Temple of the community.
Since Miner's time, the Nacirema have started building very large
temples called "mygs" that contain rows and rows of various body
torture devices which they use to punish their own bodies. The
devices are designed to tear and damage muscles, causing them to
swell. Others are designed to completely exhaust the body and use up
all of its energy so that the body starts to consume itself in order to
provide energy for movement.
While the Nacirema believe that these rituals make their bodies
stronger and more resilient to disease, the primary purpose of these
rituals seems to be to transform the shape of the body to conform to
Nacirema ideals. These ideals are so extreme that they are beyond the
reach of natural human capacity. To achieve these ideals, some
Nacirema go so far as to have ritual specialists cut them open and
inject liquids into areas of their body that they desire to be larger, or
remove soft body tissues and make other parts of their body smaller.
These new temples are just one example of how cultures are
always changing, and over the past 70 years, the Nacirema have
changed dramatically. For the Nacirema of Miner's study in 1956,
even simple black-and-white televisions were a new and exotic
technology. Today the Nacirema can be found across the social
media landscape on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube.
This offers us the ability to observe this exotic culture simply by
tuning in to their YouTube channels.
One of the more interesting rituals of the Nacirema is the strecnoc.
Hundreds and sometimes thousands of people attend these rituals
which take place around a large, elevated ritual platform known as an
egats. The rituals are often at night, so he egats is lit up in spectacular
fashion. Attendees gather in the dark around the egats and often
consume mind-altering substances such as lohocla and anaujiram while
they wait for the ritual leader to arrive. Attendees are often shaking
with anticipation as they wait for the ritual to begin, and the first
53

Michael Wesch
sighting of the ritual leader on the egats can send attendees into a
frenzy of excitement, jumping up and down, screaming, with arms
high in the air as if struggling to reach out and touch the ritual leader
and feel their power.
In the late summer of 2013, I decided to examine one of these
rituals in more detail. I did a YouTube search and watched the mostwatched
strecnoc of recent days. A large effigy of a bear, one of the
most dangerous and feared animals among the Nacirema, was placed
at the center of the egats. The bear was approximately 30 feet tall and
styled to look like the small toy bears of Nacirema children.
Nacirema children, who are often required by their parents to
sleep alone (a rare practice across cultures around the world), often
sleep with these small toy bears, seeing them as protectors and often
building up strong imaginary friendships with them.
Suddenly, a door opened up in the stomach of the large bear and
the ritual leader stepped out from inside. Dancers in toy bear
costumes rushed in from the sides of the egats to join her. Together
they took to the center of the egats and started doing a special dance
that is normally only performed in the privacy of one's own room. It
is an especially wild dance, not really meant for anyone to see, in
which you simply allow your body to do whatever it feels like doing.
This often results in a steady but awkward thrusting or shaking
motion while the arms spontaneously mimic whatever is heard in the
music. If a handheld string instrument is being played, the arms
might move as if to hold it (ria ratiug). If drums are being played, the
arms move as if to play the drums (ria smurd), and so on. It is a very
fun form of dance to do, but it is usually not meant to be seen, and
some attendees were uncomfortable watching it, especially as the
ritual leader moved more deeply into this private dance and let her
entire body move freely but awkwardly. Even her tongue seemed to
be out of control, flailing wildly about her face.
"Make some noise!" the ritual leader called to the attendees. They
screamed into a frenzy as she started the core of the ritual, the gnos.
The gnos is a poetry performance set to music and dance. The gnos
54

The Art of Being Human
began with a voice entering the room, projected from somewhere
outside of the egats:
It's our party we can do what we want.
It's our party we can say what we want.
It's our party we can love who we want
We can kiss who we want
We can see who we want
As the voice continued to poetically espouse these core Nacirema
ideals of freedom and free choice, the ritual leader continued to
demonstrate these values with her body. She bent over and started
shaking her backside in an attempt to isolate a contraction of her
gluteus maximus muscles which then send the fatty area of the
buttocks region into a wave-like motion known as gnikrewt. This is
often interpreted as being very sexually suggestive, and the mixture of
childhood toys along with such sexually suggestive dancing (tongue
flailing about, buttocks shaking), was simply too much for some of
the attendees.
Some were especially shocked because this ritual leader had until
recently been known as Annah Anatnom, a hero among children.
And she is the daughter of another famous ritual specialist, Yllib Yar
Suryc, who is best known for his wholesome family-friendly
performances such as "Some Gave All," (a tribute to military families)
and "Achy Breaky Heart."
55

Michael Wesch
56

The Art of Being Human
Ultimately, the Nacirema were deeply divided on the quality of the
performance. It seemed as if there was no middle ground. You either
hated it, or you loved it.
57

Michael Wesch
Even as the media criticized her performance, with many saying
that it was likely the end of her career, the ritual leader, Yelim, turned
their words to her advantage and celebrated the event as a great
success.
As an anthropologist, I thought it was one of the most significant
artistic performances I had ever seen, a telling portrait of what it is
like to grow up among the Nacirema. The toy bears, the awkward
“dance like nobody’s watching” dancing that you do in your room as
a young child, and the ritual dress that included a cartoon mouse on a
little girl's tutu were clear marks of childhood, all of which were shed
throughout the performance. The bears transformed into full- bodied
voluptuous women. The little girl's tutu was shed to reveal a fleshtoned
bikini, and the awkward and childish dancing transformed into
a sexual feast of humping, grinding, and gnikrewt. She was shedding
the skin of her childhood, initiating herself into her own adulthood
right in front of our eyes, struggling to show the world that she is
now a full adult, not that little girl Aannah Anatnom.
Those Nacirema who had to turn away and just couldn't stand to
watch it were probably seeing a little too much of their own awkward
childhood and transition to adulthood, for the Nacirema transition to
adulthood is always awkward. It is, as they say, a "hot mess."
58

The Art of Being Human
The cost of their core values of freedom and choice is that there
are no limitations or guidelines on how to grow up properly. There
are no clearly defined rules for what it means to be an adult. There
are no clearly defined pathways for becoming independent. Instead,
there are options at every turn of life. The Nacirema cherish these
options. But they also make growing up very, very hard.
Children are raised with the idea that they can "be whatever they
want to be." They are taught to question and distrust any message
that attempts to tell them who they are or how they should behave.
"Be true to yourself," is a commonly espoused Nacirema proverb.
Yelim echoed these sentiments in her performance, "We don't take
nothing from nobody." But because they "don't take nothing from
nobody," like advice or values, they are left with nothing to guide
them. They set off on a lifelong quest to figure out what they want to
do and who they want to be. "Who am I?" is a question that
dominates the Nacirema psyche.
As a result, many Nacirema make it their life goal to "find" their
"self." Though most Nacirema take this goal for granted, it has not
always been this way. Even in Miner's time, the 1950s, things were
different. Back then people were often encouraged to conform and
follow the rules of society. But by the late 1970s, books like William
Glasser's "The Identity Society" and Christopher Lasch's "Culture of
Narcissism" documented a shift from a culture that valued humility
59

Michael Wesch
and "finding one's place" to one that valued self-expression and
"finding one's self."
THE POWER OF CONTINGENCY
AND "MAKING THINGS FRAGILE"
It is obvious at this point that the Nacirema are not some exotic
culture, but are in fact American, and that "Nacirema" is just
"American" spelled backwards. This was Miner's trick. He forced us
to see the strange in the familiar and used the art of seeing like an
anthropologist on his own culture.
This trick is one method of "seeing your own seeing" without
going to an exotic culture. You can find the exotic right around you,
and the more mundane, the better. Because when you reveal that
even the most mundane beliefs and practices that make up your life
can be viewed as strange and exotic, they also become contingent,
which is a fancy way of saying that they need not exist or that they
could have been different. Our beliefs and practices are contingent
upon the historical and cultural conditions that led to them. And
once we recognize them as contingent, we can ask new questions
about them.
What is a self? Is it really a thing? Or is it something you do? Would it be
better to say that we "create" ourselves rather than "find" it? And what did that
other great poet, Marshall Mathers, mean when he said "You gotta lose
yourself"? Is it possible that you have to lose your self in order to find your self? If
so, what is this "self" that must be lost? Am "I" the same thing as my "self"? If
they are the same, how can I say "I" need to find my "self"? Can "I" really find,
lose, or create my "self" or do I just need to let the "I" be my "self"?
These are a special kind of questions. These questions do not
require answers; the questions are insights in themselves. They give
you new alternatives for how to think about your life. They give you
60

The Art of Being Human
a little bit of freedom from the limited perspectives offered by your
taken-for-granted assumptions, ideas, and ideals.
Michel Foucault, a social theorist and historian who has had a
large impact on anthropology, says that this kind of analysis is a way
of "making things more fragile." It shows that "what appears obvious
is not at all so obvious." In his work, Foucault he tries to show that
many of the "obvious" facts of our lives that we take for granted can
be "made fragile" through cultural and historical analysis. In this way,
we "give them back the mobility they had and that they should always
have." The ideas and ideals of our culture do not have to have total
power over us. We can play with them, make them more fragile, and
thereby take some of that power back.
This particular power of the anthropological perspective has been
at the heart of anthropology since its founding in the late 1800s.
Franz Boas, the father of American Anthropology, said that his
whole outlook on life had been determined by one question:
How can we recognize the shackles that tradition has laid upon us?
For when we recognize them, we are also able to break them.
LEARN MORE
Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, by Horace Miner
61

Michael Wesch
62

The Art of Being Human
Challenge Two: Fieldwork of the Familiar
Your challenge is to do fieldwork in your own culture, find the
strange in the familiar, and produce a compelling photo essay of your
insights.
Objective: Practice the anthropological method of seeing your own
seeing – to see the strange in the familiar – and to understand how
our taken-for-granted everyday life is actually contingent on specific
historical and cultural conditions.
Start by thinking of things that are done in your culture that might
strike an Anthropologist from Mars as strange. For example, the
Nacirema keep small animals called teps, heal themselves through the
ritual of gnippohs, spend lots of time obsessing over their bodies while
they ezicrixe, spend 13 to 25 years of their lives simply training for the
complexity of their lives in special places called loohcs, etc.
Next, go to a location where you can really observe this behavior. Try
to come up with four or five interesting observations about this
behavior. These observations will be the text of your essay. Then,
take a photograph for each of your key points that captures what you
are trying to say. This will help you construct your final photo essay
that will include four or five compelling images along with the text.
Submit your essay on Instagram with #anth101challenge2
Go to ANTH101.com/challenge2 for additional tips and
information.
63

Michael Wesch
Lesson Three
Evolution
When we open up to such questions, we open ourselves up to our
higher nature. It was asking questions, making connections and trying
new things that brought us down from the trees, and took us to the
moon.
64

The Art of Being Human
WHO ARE WE?
The mountainous interior of New Guinea offers some of the
most treacherous hiking challenges in the world. It is as rough and
steep as any other mountain range, but then it is blanketed with a
thick, wet rainforest teeming with painful fire ants, sharp stones, and
slick mud. My colleague Dan Jorgensen, who did fieldwork just a few
valleys away, calls it "vertical rainforest."
In preparation for this, I bought the best boots I could afford –
stiff and strong, with mean-looking teeth promising plenty of
traction. But they were no match for these mountains. My friends
skittered up and down mountains with ease in their bare feet while I
clobbered and hobbled along. Every step of mine seemed so heavy
and clumsy compared to the graceful and light dance they did as they
bounced from tone to stone. We all spent a lot of time on the ground
– me crawling on all fours gazing down in terror over the mountain
ledges that would surely end my life, them sitting casually upmountain
taking in the good view and enjoying a smoke.
Going down was much worse than going up. I usually took a "sit
and slide" approach, seeing no plausible way to stay on two feet and
get down safely. Meanwhile they bounded down the same precipice
65

Michael Wesch
with ease, usually carrying heavy bags full of garden produce,
firewood, or even babies.
One day about eight months into my time there, my wife and I
were gathering bamboo for a new chicken pen. Fresh bamboo is very
heavy, and the 14-foot bundles we put together were especially
unwieldy. Our shoulders shrieked with pain as we lumbered along the
slick trail home. After struggling for some time, an eight-year-old girl
who could not have weighed more than 60 pounds swooped
alongside my wife, swung her load of bamboo onto her back, and
walked off as quickly as she had arrived, leaving us trailing far behind.
Though my wife felt a little ashamed that she had been rescued by an
eight-year-old, she was happy to be rid of the load, and walked on
toward home as I continued to struggle, heaving the load 30 feet,
then 20 feet, then just 10 feet at a time, then stopping to rest and rub
my aching shoulder, letting the tall and imposing load stand beside
me. I didn't dare let it fall, for I knew I would never be able to stand
it up again.
Before long an old woman caught up, carrying a bag full of sweet
potatoes on her head. Watching me struggle with the load, she
offered to help. She appeared frail and weighed no more than 100
pounds. I was sure she would simply collapse under the weight, so I
refused. But she was insistent. She wedged her shoulder into the
standing bundle, found the balance point, let the weight sway onto
her shoulder, and skittered off toward the house with that quick and
light New Guinea step I had come to admire. I had to walk-run-walk
like a child with his parents just trying to keep up, but she scurried
further and further ahead as I struggled with the uneven terrain. By
the time I arrived home, she had already dropped off the bamboo
and was on her way.
My wife stood on the veranda, laughing. "Haha!" she teased, "I
was feeling really bad until I saw you trailing behind that old woman
carrying your bundle!" We marveled at the display of strength we had
just seen. Here were two very strong, fit, young Americans shown up
by a small child and a frail old grandmother.
66

The Art of Being Human
I had always seen myself as a fit guy with great balance and
athleticism, but the things that ordinary New Guineans of all ages
could do simply astonished me. They crossed raging rivers of certain
death on small wet logs without breaking stride. They would come to
what I would consider a cliff, the end of the trail, and bound straight
down it without hesitation or comment. They climbed trees I would
consider unclimbable, and then walk out on a thin branch 30 feet
above the ground as if it were the earth itself, and slash branches
above them with a machete while not holding on to anything to
secure themselves.
Yet there were some things we could do that they could not. A
20-foot steel pole, part of an old radio tower, had been abandoned in
the village for some 30 years from an unfinished colonial project. It
probably weighed about 150 pounds. My wife and I could both deadlift
it. Nobody else in the village, even the strongest looking men,
could do so. So at least we had that on them. We could do the
relatively useless task of dead-lifting a uniform, unnatural, perfectly
balanced steel bar off of the ground, but we couldn't carry a bundle
of heavy, unwieldy, slippery, and bumpy bamboo. We could not
navigate their paths and makeshift "bridges" without sometimes
reverting to crawling. We could not harvest our own tree fruit. We
could not carry large bundles of firewood on our heads. In short, we
might be "strong" and "fit" by American standards, but we simply
could not do any of the basic tasks required for survival in New
Guinea.
Watching such feats was a continuous reminder of another
question that had brought me there: Who are we as human beings?
What are we capable of? On a deeper level, the question is not just
about physical abilities, but also about our intellectual abilities as well
as our moral capacities and inclinations. What is our nature? When
my friends stopped and cried with me on the mountain, were they
tapping into some deep aspect of our human nature, or was that an
aspect of their culture? Are we inherently good or bad? Are empathy
67

Michael Wesch
and compassion natural inclinations, or are we more prone to be
jealous and judgmental?
To explore these questions, we need to expand our view beyond
humans today and look to our evolutionary past. We have to look at
our closest animal relatives, as well as the fossil record, to explore
what we can learn about our ancestors.
Evolution has been a touchy and controversial topic since
Charles Darwin first introduced the idea in 1859. Darwin himself
waited 23 years before publishing The Origin of Species, because he
knew it would contradict the account of creation in Genesis and set
off a broad public debate. Around the same time, Charles Lyell
published evidence that the earth was much older than the Biblical
6,000-year-old timeline. Ever since, those of us who grow up in
cultures with a Biblical tradition have had to wrestle with difficult
questions about how to square scientific knowledge with our religious
faith.
While evolution is still strongly debated in public, it has long been
firmly accepted in science. While critics like to point out that it is
"just a theory," the phrase misunderstands the definition of scientific
theory. A scientific theory is not an unproven hypothesis. The
National Academy of Sciences defines a theory as "a wellsubstantiated
explanation of some aspect of the natural world."
Theories are not tentative guesses or even well-reasoned hypotheses.
They take in a wide range of well-established facts and laws and make
sense of them. "Theories," the Academy notes, "are the end points of
science."
So evolution, like any scientific theory, is not something to be
simply believed or disbelieved. It is to be understood and
continuously reassessed based on the evidence. As Stephen Jay
Gould points out, evolution is not only a theory, it is also an
established scientific fact due to the mountains of data and
observations supporting it. Nothing is absolutely certain in science,
so "scientific fact" does not mean "absolute certainty." Rather, a
68

The Art of Being Human
scientific fact is something that is "confirmed to such a degree that it
would be perverse to withhold provisional assent."
Does this mean that God does not exist and that the Bible is
wrong? This is a difficult question that each of us has to answer for
ourselves. Most Americans who become college-educated end up
accepting evolution (73%) and many of them see God as guiding the
process or having planned the process out from the beginning of
time (41%). Many professional evolutionary scientists hold this view
as well, and it affords them the great joy of exploring the vastness of
our world and its history. As my friend and colleague Keith Miller,
who is both an evangelical Christian and an evolutionary scientist,
wrote in a now-famous article on the theological implications of
evolution, "Our continually developing scientific understanding of
cosmic history should produce great awe at God's incalculable power
and wisdom ... He instructed Job to contemplate the created
universe. When we contemplate the universe today should we not,
even more than Job, be overwhelmed by God's greatness?"
So one reason to study evolution is to simply stand in awe of the
unfolding cosmos that has ultimately led to this moment right now.
But there are other, more practical reasons as well. Studying
evolution helps us understand who we are at the biological level. It
helps explain how and why we get stressed, why we are prone to
getting fat, and why we are prone to fall into bad habits. Most of us
will die of a disease that is caused by a mismatch between the
environments that we evolved to survive in, and those that we live in
today. Understanding our evolutionary past can help you stay alive. It
can also explain why we are prone to fall in love, feel jealous, or rage
with hate or fear. Our biology is always a part of our lives. We tend
to deny this fact, but the more we acknowledge it and learn about it,
the better we will be able to handle the ups and downs of everyday
life, stay healthy, and perhaps even do some things that we never
thought possible.
As a small-town kid from Nebraska, I also had to wrestle with
these questions. It was a constant source of discussion and debate in
69

Michael Wesch
my college dorm, often taking us deep into the early hours of the
morning. While my own conclusions are irrelevant to your own, I
simply want to note that I am grateful that my conclusions allowed
me to open up to the wealth of research and information emerging
out of evolutionary science today, as they have greatly enriched my
life. They have helped me understand who we are, our human
potential, and most importantly, helped me regain much of the
human potential I had lost through years of unhealthy habits. While
this chapter cannot possibly tell the entirety of the human story or
pass on all of the wisdom to be gathered from an understanding of
human evolution, I hope that it can serve as an invitation for you to
explore more.
20 MILLION YEARS AGO:
THE MONKEY ALLIANCE
Step into the Tai Forest of Africa and you will hear a wild
cacophony of calls, sounds, and melodies that would have been
familiar to our ancient ancestors. Birds singing, monkeys hooting,
bugs chirping, frogs croaking, and a multitude of other sounds fill the
air. Listen closely enough, and you can start to tune into the
conversation.
Klaus Zuberbuhler has spent years studying the calls of the
primates in this forest. In one study, he started by playing leopard
sounds and then listened for the response. Diana monkeys sitting in
the forest canopy always responded with the same recognizable alarm
call. He played the shrieks of an eagle and heard what he thought was
the same call. But back in his lab he created a spectrogram of the calls
and discovered that they were actually different calls. The Diana
monkeys were distinguishing threats from above, like eagles, from
threats from below, like leopards, with subtle variations in pitch.
They were singing, and using their songs for survival.
One day, Klaus was walking through this forest when, suddenly,
his ability to tune into this conversation became a matter of life or
70

The Art of Being Human
death. Diana monkeys were sounding an alarm from high in the trees
above him. A leopard was in the area. As he moved through the
forest, the calls moved closer and seem to follow his every move. The
leopard was stalking him! He kept his ears tuned into the Diana
monkeys overhead and quickened his pace, walking with anxious
deliberation toward the safety of his camp. He dared not run.
Inside Klaus's body, an ancient stress response kicked in. He was
filled with a rush of adrenaline. Without making any conscious
decisions, he cashed in on the fat he had stored up for just such an
occasion. It was transformed into glycogen, which raced through his
bloodstream, powered by his racing heart. His awareness heightened.
Meanwhile, all of his body's long-term projects ceased. The body shut
down repair, growth, and reproduction. His body was fully primed
and in the moment. No time for long-term goals now.
This basic biological stress response is one that he shares with the
monkeys, as well as the leopard and all other creatures of the animal
kingdom. Everyone in that life or death drama is completely in the
moment as their fight or flight response kicks in.
The monkeys above swarmed the leopard. They did not run
away. Their calls could be heard across monkey species, allowing
monkeys of different types to form a sort of monkey alliance,
constantly calling out and staring down at the leopard from multiple
angles to let the leopard know they had him in their sights. Leopards
like to attack by ambush. As the monkeys swarmed overhead, the
leopard knew its cover was blown, and it gave up the hunt. Klaus
made it safely back to camp, saved by his distant brothers and sisters,
exhilarated by the experience of hearing, and actually understanding,
the language of these distant relatives, separated by over 20 million
years of evolution. For a moment, he remembered that he too was
part of that great monkey alliance.
Though the Diana monkeys of today are not the Diana monkeys
of 20 million years ago, fossil evidence shows that creatures that
looked very much like Diana monkeys existed 20 million years ago,
71

Michael Wesch
and are likely the common ancestor of ourselves and those monkeys
who were sounding the alarm from those trees.
How did we split and become separate species? In order for new
species to occur, there has to be some form of reproductive isolation.
This usually happens as populations become geographically isolated
from one another and end up occupying different environments.
Slowly, generation after generation, some genes are passed on while
others are not, and given the different environments, the two
populations eventually become so different they can no longer
reproduce with one another. They are now permanently isolated
reproductively, and have become separate species.
The past 25 million years in East Africa have been an especially
prime period for speciation among primates. Climate changes, along
with high levels of volcanic activity, dramatically reshaped the Earth.
creating numerous environmental niches within a fairly small
geographic region. Populations that found themselves in lush jungle
rainforests adapted very differently from those who found
themselves in more sparsely vegetated woodlands or open savannahs.
By 13 million years ago, our ancestors split from orangutans, and by
eight million years ago, from gorillas. We split from chimpanzees and
bonobos (a.k.a. pygmy chimpanzees) by about six million years ago.
WHY WE SING
The ability to sing is shared widely among birds and mammals.
And while our closest relatives are quite good at communicating
through singing, the most complex use of a "singing" language
among mammals might not belong to them, but to prairie dogs.
While they may not share much DNA with us, they do share a similar
challenge. Much like the early hominids who first came down from
the trees, prairie dogs are easily spotted in the wide-open grasslands
by a vast range of predators. Singing is a survival strategy.
72

The Art of Being Human
Prairie dogs have created different calls for coyotes, badgers, and
hawks, all of which require different defense responses. In
experimental situations, biologist Con Slobodchikoff has
demonstrated that prairie dogs can sing different chirps to indicate
the shape, color, speed, size, and mode of travel of a potential
incoming threat.
While not as sophisticated as the songs of prairie dogs, most
birds and mammals have at least some rudimentary singing abilities
that allow them to communicate. The simplest singing systems in the
animal kingdom involve two sounds, a low-pitched growl often used
as a threat, and a higher pitched melody used to indicate friendliness,
submission, or vulnerability. A dog growls deeply as a threat, and
yelps or squeals meekly when threatened. A dog might also use a
high-pitched whimper as he cuddles into a human, a clear request for
a pet or cuddle. Weaver birds, crows, guinea pigs, rats, Tasmanian
devils, elephants, and monkeys use low and high tones in similar
fashion. "Simply stated," noted Eugene Morton of the National Zoo
after a review of over 70 species, "birds and mammals use harsh,
relatively low-frequency sounds when hostile and higher-frequency,
more pure tonelike sounds when frightened, appeasing, or
approaching in a friendly manner." Linguist John Ohala notes that
these pitch variations are part of a universal "frequency code" that
extends across species, in which low, deep, full sounds indicate
dominance and aggression, while high thin sounds indicate
harmlessness, submission, or a plea for connection. You tap into it
every time you lower your voice to admonish your dog or raise your
voice to ask for a snuggle.
There is significant evidence that our ancestors were using a
much more complex singing system to connect and collaborate.
Thousands of miles from the cacophony of the Tai forest or the
chirping of prairie dogs on the North American Plains, Ann Fernald
was sitting in an obstetrics unit in Germany listening to some
interesting songs as well, those coming from the mothers of newborn
humans. The hospital attracted mothers from all over the world;
73

Michael Wesch
many languages, and many cultures. But when they spoke to their
babies it was as if they were all tapping into that same evolutionary
heritage that Klaus was trying to uncover in the Tai Forest. They
raised their pitch, exaggerated their emotional tone, slowed down,
shortened their sentences, and often repeated themselves. They were
using that ancient singing language, and though they were coming
from many different cultures and speaking many different languages,
Ann knew the tunes. It was there that she discovered four universal
songs of baby-talk:
1. The approval song with its rising and then falling pitch
(GOOD girl!);
2. The warning and prohibition song with its short, sharp
staccato (No! Stop!);
3. The lingering and smooth, low frequency comfort song
("oh …. poor little baby …" ); and
4. The song she calls "The Attention Bid," a high, rising
melody, often used for asking questions and calling
attention to objects ("Where's the BALL?").
To explore just how universal these songs might be, Greg Bryant
and Clark Barrett of UCLA recorded English-speaking mothers
talking to their babies and went into the Amazon rainforest to see if
the Shuar, a group of remote hunter- horticulturalists, also knew the
tunes. They did.
The universality of the songs indicates that they are very old. Our
first ancestors probably knew similar tunes. We hear similar tunes
among our closest relatives, gorillas and chimpanzees. When lowland
gorillas hear strange sounds or spot obscured observers, they sound a
mild alert that Dian Fossey called the "question bark." The bark, with
a rising intonation that falls at the end, was described by Fossey as
sounding like "Who are you?"
Jane Goodall describes "inquiring pant-hoots" that rise in pitch,
like human questions used by chimpanzees. After the pant-hoot a
74

The Art of Being Human
chimp will listen quietly for a response from another chimp, and in
getting one, learns the whereabouts and identities of other chimps
nearby. Long before full human languages developed 100,000 years
ago, we were probably sending messages through simple songs like
these. And the songs we sang said a great deal about who we were.
We asked questions. We showed compassion for one another. We
helped each other avoid dangers, and we offered each other
encouragement. Taken together, they represent four key capacities:
teaching, learning, cooperation and compassion. All would have been
great assets as we walked off into the dangerous open grasslands.
SIX MILLION YEARS AGO: WE WALKED
As you think about just how vulnerable Klaus was as he walked
through a forest full of dangerous predators like that leopard,
consider just how astounding it is that we ever evolved to come
down from the trees at all. Yet we did. About six or seven million
years ago, we start to see the tell-tale signs of bipedalism (walking on
two legs) emerging. Hominid bones found from that time show a
pelvis starting to tilt sideways, an S-shaped spine, and a stiffened foot
with upward curving toes, all of which would help us walk without
waddling but reduced our capacities to climb trees.
But why? Why would we come down from the safety of the trees
where fruit was plentiful and predators were not? How could we even
begin to escape or compete with the big cats who could run up to 60
mph and had powerful jaws and ferocious fangs and claws? We had
no weapons – natural or man-made – and weren't even as tall or large
as we are today. We were just 4 feet tall and weighed about 110
pounds, the size of a husky third-grader.
How did we do it? Why did we do it?
We probably had no choice. The Earth was cooling and forests
were shrinking, especially in East Africa, where our ancestors lived.
Dense rain forests were giving way to woodlands and open
grasslands. Fruit dwindled along with the dwindling forests. What
75

Michael Wesch
fruit was left was being eaten up by monkeys who had developed
abilities to eat unripened fruit, picking over the trees before we could
even get to them.
As fruit sources dwindled, one strategy for survival was to simply
get better at obtaining fruit. The ancestors of chimpanzees did this,
using their remarkable agility to swing through trees in order to get at
hard-to-reach fruit, and to occasionally pick off unsuspecting prey.
Another strategy was to adapt to a fruitless diet where there was less
competition. The ancestors of gorillas did this, moving to a diet of
leaves and growing to large sizes that slowed their metabolism,
requiring fewer calories.
But while these strategies could work in dense forested
environments, they would not work in lightly forested woodlands and
grasslands where our ancestors lived. Leaves and fruit were not as
plentiful. Instead of focusing on just one food source, we developed
abilities eat many kinds of food, including meat, and to move more
efficiently on land so that we could cover more ground and thereby
gather more food. We also retained some of our climbing abilities so
could exploit a wide range of foods in the trees, on the ground, and
under the ground (roots and tubers).
In other words, we didn't give up on tree-climbing and become
bipedal overnight. One of the best-preserved skeletons from four
million years ago, nicknamed 'Ardi,' shows that our ancestors at this
time retained grasping toes and other features that would still allow
them to climb remarkably well by modern human standards, but they
were also not as efficient at walking as we are.
Many people assume we became bipedal so we could use tools,
but we wouldn't start using tools for at least a million years after we
first started walking. The original advantage of walking on two legs
was efficiency. While chimps only walk about 1.5 miles a day, a
modern human can walk about six miles a day using the same
amount of energy. Our earliest ancestors were probably not as
efficient at walking as we are today, but even a slight increase in
efficiency would have allowed them to travel and gather foods over a
76

The Art of Being Human
wider range and still maintain the calorie balance they needed to
survive and reproduce.
Over time, the more efficient walkers were more likely to
reproduce, and so generation after generation we became more and
more adapted to walking, able to cover more and more territory.
While standing up made us more visible to predators, it also
allowed us to spot them and take away the element of surprise, just as
those Diana monkeys did for Klaus. This is where our ancient ability
to sing would be so important.
Singing, collaborating, and walking on two legs would set off a
cascade of changes that would make us who we are today. With our
hands free, we could carry food back to our young and elderly,
broadening our abilities to share, and eventually develop more
sophisticated tools and technologies. Each technology not only
improved our abilities to acquire food, but would also change how
we worked and lived together. The hominid brain grew as we were
able to obtain more calories to fuel its growth, and it needed to grow
in order to deal with the increasing demands of cooperation and
navigating increasingly complex social relationships.
By 2.5 million years ago, we were fully committed to life on the land.
Our capacities to climb and live in the trees had dwindled along with
the size of our arms, fingers, and toes. We could no longer grab a
branch with our feet or swing effortlessly from tree to tree. But our
legs were now long, straight, and efficient. We were no longer just
walking. We were running, but before we could run efficiently, we
would have to develop yet another key adaptation.
2.5 MILLION YEARS AGO:
WE GOT FAT AND SWEATY
Our growing brains required a constant source of energy, which
would have been difficult to maintain if it also required a constant
source of food in sometimes unpredictable and sparse environments.
Fortunately, we got fat. Fat is rich in energy, storing nine calories in
77

Michael Wesch
each gram (vs. just 4 calories per gram of carbohydrate or protein).
When food was scarce, we could call upon the fat reserves we stored
on our bodies to sustain us. Those who could survive through the
leanest of times would be those who would reproduce to create the
next generation. And generation after generation, we got fatter.
The average monkey is born with about 3 percent body fat, while
we humans are born with fifteen percent. A healthy human child will
blossom to an energy-potent 25 percent body fat before settling back
down into the teens in adulthood. A typical female hunter-gatherer
has a body fat of about 15 percent, while a male weighs in at about 10
percent – thin by American standards, yet still much fatter than
chimpanzees.
Getting fat was essential to our survival, and to this day we
maintain a remarkable ability to pack it on when the feeding is good.
Our tastes evolved to help us gorge on high calorie foods whenever
they were available, so we have natural cravings for fatty or sweet
foods, both of which are especially high in calories.
As we gained the capacity to store fat, we also lost our fur and
covered our skin with sweat glands, allowing us to stay cool even in
the heat of the African equatorial sun. While other animals have to
rely on circulating air through their bodies as quickly as possible by
panting, we can simply let the air move around us as we sweat,
making us the most efficient air-cooled bio-engine on the planet.
TWO MILLION YEARS AGO: WE RAN.
By two million years ago, our ancestors started to look very
different from chimpanzees. Our bodies became more adapted for
life on the ground, not in the trees. Our legs grew longer and thinner
near the ends, giving us a longer and lighter step. Our toes got
shorter, our butts got bigger, and our arms grew shorter, allowing us
to be more stable and efficient while running. Our heads became
more separated from the shoulders, creating the need for the nuchal
ligament, used to stabilize the head. Our joint surfaces expanded to
78

The Art of Being Human
reduce the shock of each footfall. The plantar arch and Achilles
tendon gave us more elastic energy. Our legs became biological
springs. The springy arch of our foot increases our running efficiency
by 17%.
The combination of running adaptations makes running only 30-
50 percent less efficient than walking. By 2004, the research team of
Daniel Lieberman, Dennis Bramble, and David Carrier had identified
26 adaptations in the human body that were necessary for running
that are not required for walking. As Chris MacDougal famously
summarized, we were "Born to Run."
Despite all these remarkable adaptations for running, we're not
very fast compared to other animals. The fastest land animals have
four legs, allowing them to thrust themselves to speeds well over 40
mph and sometimes, as in the case of the cheetah, to over 60 mph.
The fastest humans can only run about 27 mph.
But despite being slow, we had several key advantages. Our
ability to sweat would allow us to move around in the heat of the day,
while the most dangerous predators and scavengers rested in the
shade. Though we did not yet have spear-tipped projectiles for
hunting, we would have been able to gather plant foods and scavenge
for meat across great distances in the heat of the day. Walking on two
legs also freed our hands and allowed us to enter potentially
dangerous situations to find or scavenge whatever we could, grab it,
and then quickly carry it back to safer ground.
These abilities might also help explain a peculiar mystery in the
archaeological record. By 1.9 million years ago, there is evidence that
we were successfully hunting wild game such as kudu and wildebeest.
But stone spear heads do not appear until 300,000 years ago, and it is
nearly impossible to kill a large animal with a wooden tipped spear
unless you're very close to the animal, which is impossible if the
animal is not in some kind of distress. So if we were successfully
hunting large game 1.9 million years ago, long before the invention of
adequate weapons – how did we do it?
79

Michael Wesch
It turned out that being fat, sweaty, and able to cooperate is a
deadly weapon. Lieberman's research team found that our running
abilities, combined with our ability to burn fat reserves and cool
ourselves with sweat, allowed us to jog faster and farther than most
quadrupeds can sustain, especially in the hot midday sun. All we had
to do was flush an animal like a kudu or wildebeest out of the herd
and scare it into a gallop. It would need to pant to cool down, but it
cannot pant while running. If we could keep it on the run over a long
period of time, it would collapse of heat exhaustion. We could
literally run our prey to death. They called it "persistence hunting."
Lieberman and his team had the biological markers and the
mathematical evidence to support their claim. But while there were
several stories of persistence hunting in cultures around the world,
there had not been a confirmed observation that such a feat was
possible.
The evidence they needed would come from a college dropout
driven by a very big question. In the early 1980s, Louis Liebenberg
was taking a philosophy of science class at the University of Cape
Town when he started asking the big question of how humans ever
came to contemplate big questions in the first place. He had a hunch
that the first complicated thinking might have come from the
challenge of tracking wild game, which would have forced early
humans to use a great deal of imagination and reasoning to decode
the path and whereabouts of an animal based on a few tracks in the
earth. Like all great questions, the question took him farther than he
ever thought possible, and before long he was trekking out into the
desert to find one of the last bands of the Kalahari Bushmen still
living a more or less traditional way of life. After finally finding them,
he settled in and lived with them for four years.
One day they invited him on a hunt. They walked for nearly
twenty miles before finally coming upon a herd of kudu. They started
running. The herd scattered, allowing them to separate one from the
herd. Each time the kudu ran under a tree to rest. they would flush it
out into the sun while corralling it away from the herd, keeping it
80

The Art of Being Human
isolated. After a few hours of being chased, the kudu started to falter,
and then fell to the ground. The Bushmen had their prey, and Louis
had unequivocal evidence that persistence hunting is not only
possible, but still happening today.
This means that for the past two million years, our ancestors have
been routinely walking and running 20 miles to chase down wild
animals. The traits that allowed them to do this are the same traits we
have today. Yet today, few of us can run even a few miles at a time,
let alone 20.
The Raramuri of the Copper Canyons of Mexico also engage in
persistence hunting, running deer and wild turkeys to death. By
frightening large turkeys into a series of take-offs, they eventually tire
and lack the strength to get away from the hunters.
The Raramuri give us an enticing glimpse into the full potential of
our endurance running bodies. Reports of their astounding running
abilities reached bestselling author and sports journalist Chris
MacDougal, who eventually found his way to their homeland to see
them in action and write the bestselling book Born to Run. He reports
that the Raramuri (also known as the Tarahumara) regularly run over
100 miles at a single go.
Most remarkably, Raramuri of all ages can run like this. In fact, it
is often the elders – those over 50 years old – who are the fastest. In
1992, a few Raramuri came to the U.S. to race in the Leadville 100, an
ultra-marathon of 100 miles over the Colorado Rockies. They wanted
to bring their best, so they brought Victoriano Churro, a 55-year-old
Raramuri grandfather.
Historian Francisco Almada reports that a Raramuri man once
ran 435 miles without stopping, and reports of others running over
300 miles are not uncommon.
What allows the Raramuri to run so far, over such tough terrain,
and for so long (well into old age), is that they run with that same
gentle skitter step I had come to admire among my friends in New
Guinea. Like our ancestors, they are running barefoot or with very
thin homemade sandals. This forces them to stay light on their feet,
81

Michael Wesch
taking short quick strides and landing on the ball of their forefoot in
order to absorb the impact, rather than striding out and striking their
heel, the style preferred by most runners shod in thick-soled running
shoes.
Noting the low injury rate among barefoot runners around the
world, Dan Lieberman did a study of the Harvard track team,
comparing athletes who were forefoot strikers (barefoot style) versus
those who were heel strikers. The injury rate for heel strikers was 2.6
times that of forefoot strikers.
But perhaps the most striking feature of the running style that
Chris MacDougal and others found among the Raramuri, and that I
witnessed among my friends in New Guinea, is the pure joy they take
in running. It is not a penance for indulging in too much food. It is
not "exercise" or "working out." It is fun. "Such a sense of joy!"
legendary track coach Joe Vigil exclaimed as he watched the Raramuri
laugh as they scrambled up a steep mountainside 50 miles into the
Leadville 100.
When Ken Choubler, the race's founder, saw the Raramuri
running after over 50 miles on his grueling mountain course, he
would tell MacDougal that they looked normal—"freakishly ...
normal." They didn't have their heads down, face grimacing with
pain, just trying to tough it out. They were enjoying themselves.
"That old guy?" MacDougal writes, "Victoriano? Totally cool. Like he
just woke up from a nap, scratched his belly, and decided to show the
kids how the big boys play the game."
Victoriano, age 55, won the race that day, edging out a younger
Raramuri runner for the win. The top non-Raramuri competitor was
six miles back.
MODERN HUMANS AND THE
CREATIVE EXPLOSION
Taken all together, the evidence suggests that starting
approximately two million years ago, we were still relying on the
82

The Art of Being Human
gathering of fruits, nuts, and tubers over a wide area as our primary
means of subsistence. We scavenged and hunted when opportunities
arose, and we were starting to develop some basic stone tools to cut
and process our food.
A positive feedback loop started to emerge. The better we got at
obtaining food, the more calories we had to grow our brains. As our
brains grew, we got better at obtaining food. By about 500,000 years
ago, we had enough intelligence to invent a stone-tipped spear
capable of penetrating thick animal hides at great distances, and our
upright running bodies were adapted to throw them with a force and
accuracy unmatched among all other animals. A chimpanzee can be
trained to throw, but they can only throw at about 20 mph. A human
can wind their upright body up like a rubber band and let the
rotational force of their full body, along with the rotation of their
shoulder, combined to generate speeds of up to 9,000 degrees of
rotation per second. Even a mediocre human athlete can throw up to
70 mph with remarkable accuracy. Most impressively, we could not
only throw accurately enough to hit a rabbit, we could hit a moving
rabbit. Our ability to hit a moving rabbit requires yet another key
human skill: imagination.
Neil Roach, anthropologist at George Washington University,
told MacDougal that "this ability to produce powerful throws is
crucial to the intensification of hunting." Once we could obtain a
steadier high-quality source of meat, "this dietary change led to
seismic shifts in our ancestors' biology, allowing them to grow larger
bodies, larger brains, and to have more children."
The positive feedback loop would continue as we domesticated
fire approximately 400,000 years ago, allowing us to obtain more and
more high-quality calories from our foods by cooking them. We
could also stay warm in colder climates, expanding into new
territories, and share stories and information as we sat around the fire
well into the night, having artificially extended the day for the first
time.
83

Michael Wesch
By 200,000 years ago the first modern humans, Homo sapiens, had
arrived. Genetically, they were us. If you could transport a newborn
from 200,000 years ago into the present, they would learn our
language, go to school, and fit right in. Every human on the planet
today can trace their roots back to these African ancestors, 200,000
years ago. We had dark skin to protect us from harsh ultraviolet rays
of the sun. Compared to the animals we evolved from, we were fat
and sweaty. But we could run long distances, throw, make tools, use
our imaginations, and perhaps most importantly, communicate and
collaborate better than any other creatures in the world.
Communication and collaboration allowed us to develop even
more sophisticated technologies, including clothing, that would allow
us to spread out of Africa and settle all over the world. Our trade
networks expanded, allowing innovations to be shared over greater
and greater distances. The archaeological record shows an explosion
of creativity starting around 50,000 years ago, sometimes called the
Creative Explosion. A technique for the mass manufacture of thin stone
blades was discovered. Tools became more sophisticated and
versatile. Atlatls, notched sticks into which we placed the butts of our
spears, increased the amount of force we could use to hurl those
spears, achieving faster speeds and more power. Nets and fishhooks
allowed us to expand our diets to more seafood, while new methods
of food preparation such as grinding and boiling allowed us to use
and process more and more of the calories available to us. We told
stories, painted pictures, made jewelry, and developed a rich,
symbolic world that would tie us together into larger, more complex
groups.
In short, we invented culture. We asked questions, made
connections, and tried new things. From that moment forward, the
pace of our cultural innovation would far outstrip the human body's
ability to adapt to the new environments we created.
84

The Art of Being Human
LEARN MORE
The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman
Born to Run by Chris McDougall
RadioLab Podcast: Wild Talk
RadioLab Podcast: Musical Language
85

Michael Wesch
THE (UN)MAKING OF THE MODERN BODY:
RE-CLAIMING OUR HUMAN POTENTIAL
Our adaptations developed over millions of years in woodlands
and open grasslands, where food was often low in calories and
sometimes hard to find, not calorie-dense, plentiful and sitting on
supermarket shelves; a place where cats were large and a constant
threat to your life, not domesticated house pets; a place where you
had to walk or run to get your food, not drive your car or submit an
order on Amazon. Most importantly, it was a place where a strong
desire for calorie-rich foods and an ability to store them as fat were
useful strategies for surviving and passing on your genes, a place
where a stress reaction that sends adrenaline rushing through your
body could save your life, and a place where you wouldn't have to
think about how to sneak in your exercise for the day. As such, we
now struggle against our most basic instincts and impulses to
maintain our minds and bodies in good health.
86

The Art of Being Human
MISMATCH DISEASES
The ailments that come about from the mismatch between how
we have evolved and the environments we now inhabit are called
mismatch diseases. Mismatch diseases result from one of three
conditions: (1) too much of something, (2) too little of something, or
(3) new things or behaviors we have not yet adapted to. For example,
compared to the environments of our ancestors, we have (1) too
much fat and sugar, (2) too little movement and exercise, and (3) we
aren't biologically adapted to the complexities of modern life, such as
complex social networks, economic pressures, media, social media,
and many others.
As a result, we suffer from several mismatch diseases related to
overeating, lack of exercise, and high stress. Obesity, Type 2 diabetes,
cavities, anxiety, depression, high blood pressure and other stressrelated
ailments that lead to strokes, heart attacks and other illnesses
are just a few of the mismatch diseases that might result.
Remember Klaus's stress reaction as he fled from the leopard?
The problem is that modern life can potentially induce a series of
similar reactions, but while Klaus's situation was brief (a few minutes)
with simple decisions and actions (evade the leopard) and a clear
ending point (safety back at camp), many of our modern stressors are
long-lasting (What am I going to do with my life?, 30-year
mortgages), involve complex decisions, may not require any action
(and therefore no outlet for all that extra energy and adrenaline), and
have no clear ending point. Many people today live with a constant
feeling of stress, and the health implications are tremendous. Longterm
stress wreaks havoc on our cardiovascular system, which can
lead to adult-onset diabetes. Our amygdala, which controls our fear
response, grows and becomes hyper-reactive, leading to anxiety
disorders. Our dopamine, which controls emotion, is depleted,
leading to depression. And our frontal cortex, the place where we
make decisions, atrophies, leading to poor judgment. Ultimately,
Robert Sapolsky notes, "Most of us will have the profound
87

Michael Wesch
Westernized luxury of dropping dead someday of a stress-related
disease."
A large number of addictions might also be considered mismatch
diseases. We evolved to crave calories, sex, love, friendship, security,
comfort, and novelty. Modern technology provides what are known
as "supernormal stimuli" in all these areas. A supernormal stimulus
takes key features from the natural objects we have evolved to crave
and magnifies those aspects that are most stimulating, while offering
very little or none of the actual reward we need.
In the 1950s, birds were tricked into preferring fake eggs with
more vibrant colors over their own. In the human domain, a glazed
donut is a cheap calorie-bomb loaded with a perfect ratio of fat and
sugar stimuli encased in a soft form that's as easy to digest as it is to
hold in your hand. It gives us all of the pleasure of eating a rich meal
with none of the nourishment. We evolved to crave fat and highcalorie
foods, and to gorge on them when we could; but the abilities
to pack on the fat did not evolve in the context of cheap, plentiful
donuts, greasy cheeseburgers, and sugary, high-calorie drinks. Our
tastes and ability to store fat are a mismatch for today's environment
of abundance, so we now face health risks from being too fat.
But we have "junk food" in other domains as well. Pornography
offers supernormal sexual stimuli while providing none of the love,
connection, and offspring that may result from real sex. Movies, TV
shows, and video games provide a constant onslaught of novelty,
excitement, and drama without any need to get out of our chairs.
These supernormal stimuli not only exaggerate the things we have
evolved to crave (sex, love, novelty, excitement), but do so without
us having to put ourselves at any risk, socially or physically.
In short, there is a "junk food diet" available in virtually every
domain of our needs and desires. When we feel stressed, lonely,
hungry, or any of the other evolutionary triggers that would normally
spring us into action to go out into the world to find food or a mate,
we can instead gorge on pizza, donuts, porn, and movies. While none
of these things will make us "sick" or addicted in moderation, they
88

The Art of Being Human
are dangerous in excess, and it's worth considering how we might
experience life differently without them.
Junk food, porn and Netflix have become so common in our
culture as to become the norm. About 74% of American men and
64% of American women are overweight. On average, we watch over
five hours of TV every day. And while few people admit to watching
porn, a recent study by the Max Planck Institute estimated that 50%
of all Internet traffic is sex-related.
Most people would probably not even consider the idea that we
can be "addicted" to something as mundane and normalized as junk
food, porn, or Netflix. We tend to reserve the word "addiction" for
hard drugs and alcohol. But recent studies in the science of addiction
are demonstrating that there are deep and important changes inside
the brain of those who have behavioral addictions that are similar to
those with drug addictions.
At a biological level, our cravings are driven by dopamine, a
neurotransmitter in the reward circuitry of the brain that plays a key
role in elevating our motivation to take action. Dopamine levels rise
in anticipation of a reward or when under high stress, encouraging us
to act. Supernormal stimuli make dopamine levels spike, which is why
they are so difficult to resist. However, when we indulge in these
supernormal stimuli too often, we become desensitized to dopamine.
Everyday pleasures seem bland and unsatisfying. We lack motivation,
and when normal stimuli are no longer enough, we're forced to seek
out supernormal stimuli to give us that rush of dopamine, and key
brain changes emerge that are similar to those we see in substance
addicts. There is reduced activity in the areas of the brain that control
willpower and reduced abilities to handle everyday stresses, which
often trigger more relapses into the addictive behavior. This can lead
to a vicious cycle in which we feel very little pleasure and lack the
willpower to avoid our "junk food diet" when we face even a minor
stress. We take the edge off with a little indulgence, which only makes
us want more while reducing our willpower and stress-resistance.
89

Michael Wesch
Most importantly, we become more and more numb to the pleasures
of everyday life.
DISEASES OF CAPTIVITY
The dorsal fin of a killer whale in the wild stands strong and
straight, an awe-inspiring symbol of their power as it crests over the
water. But if you've ever seen a killer whale at SeaWorld, you'll notice
that their fins curl lazily over to one side, a condition sometimes
called "floppy fin syndrome." Scientists hypothesize that lack of
movement, constant turning in tight spaces, dietary changes, and
other aspects of captivity cause the condition. Though it's not lifethreatening,
it is a powerful symbol of how artificial environments
can shape a biological body.
Our bodies are no different. We have crafted an artificial
environment with soft chairs, beds, and pillows where the ground is
always firm and perfectly flat, complete with transport devices that
allow us to sit in comfort as we transport ourselves from one artificial
comfort pod to the next, and the temperature is always about 72
degrees. We prepare food on counters, not squatting on the ground.
We sit on toilets rather than squatting in the woods. We walk on
sidewalks while wearing padded shoes with raised heels.
As a result, our bodies are like the floppy fins of SeaWorld. Katy
Bowman, an expert in biomechanics and author of several bestselling
books on natural human movement, refers to the floppy fin as a
"disease of captivity," and claims that so are our "bum knees,
collapsed arches, eroded hips, tight hamstrings, leaky pelvic floors,
collapsed ankles" and many more modern ailments. These diseases of
captivity are a special subclass of mismatch diseases that affect the
alignment and function of our bodies.
As a quick test of just how much of your own basic ability to
move like our ancestors has been lost, try to sit in a deep squat with
your feet flat on the ground. This is a natural rest position for
humans. You see children playing in this position for long periods
90

The Art of Being Human
without experiencing any discomfort. People all over the world who
live in environments with few chairs can rest in this position well into
old age. Most Americans have lost the ability to get into this position
by age 20, and only a very small percentage find the position
comfortable and restful. In a survey of resting positions worldwide,
anthropologist Gordon Hewes found that deep squatting "has a very
wide distribution except for European and European-derived
cultures."
While this may seem like an unimportant skill, it's a quick
demonstration of our lost potential and has serious implications for
our health, abilities, and longevity. An inability to squat may indicate
weak glutes or a weak core, which are essential to balance and basic
human movements like running, walking, and jumping. Your hips
might lack the flexibility and mobility they once had. Hip mobility is
essential for stability and balance, so tight hips put you at risk for
serious injury. And the movements we make to adjust for tight hips
often lead to back pain and other ailments. As you age, these
conditions become a matter of life and death. As Katy Bowman
points out, "the more you need to use your hands and knees to get
up from the floor, the greater your risk of dying from all causes."
Perhaps it's a telling sign of just how damaging our comforts might
be that Katy Bowman chooses to live in a house with almost no
furniture.
Another test: try walking or running barefoot – but go easy on
this one. Don't try to go out and run 100 miles like a Raramuri, or
even one mile if it's your first try in a while. The muscles and tendons
that hold up your arch and give you the spring you need to run
barefoot are probably weak with underuse. You might seriously injure
yourself because of your dependence on shoes. You probably won't
get very far anyway because of the pain on your skin. Without the
natural callouses of barefoot humans, every little pebble and stick will
deliver piercing pain, and you may find many surfaces either too hot
or too cold. Your feet are like prisoners trapped in the dark, sensory-
91

Michael Wesch
deprived caves of comfortable shoes, coming out into the light for
the first time. It will take a while to adjust to the light.
It's worth it, though. Over time your feet will adapt and regain
much of their lost potential. Your skin contacting the Earth will
deliver key signals to your brain to make you more sure-footed and
balanced. Your posture and flexibility will improve as you stand flatfooted
without an artificially raised heel or supported arch, and over
100 muscles and 33 joints that have weakened in their captive state
will be set free to strengthen and unleash their full potential, helping
you become stronger, faster, injury-resistant, and more agile. Harvard
anthropologist Dan Lieberman notes that in the Kenyan villages
where he works, most people grow up barefoot and he has yet to
encounter a fallen arch or many of the other foot ailments that plague
many Americans.
"We aren't really sick," says Katy Bowman, "we are just starved."
We are missing key nutrients, "movement nutrients." Our bodies are
made up of cells. When cells get activated, they get fed with oxygen,
which flushes out cellular waste and revitalizes them. We feed our
cells by using them, by putting them under load. Those muscles and
tissues we put under more load grow and stay healthy, while those we
don't use wither and die. When it comes to body tissues, you either
use it or lose it. Your body changes shape as some parts grow
stronger and others wither. The alignment of your body parts shifts
as some muscles pull more strongly on your joints than others.
Ultimately, the shape and alignment of your body is the result of how
you move.
Instead of "exercise," Katy Bowman suggests that we need a steadier
and balanced diet of movement. Someone who exercises regularly
works out for about 300 minutes per week. But our ancestors were
moving 3,000 minutes per week; and their movements fed all their
body tissues, not just a few select spots. Bowman suggests moving
away from modern comforts that restrict movement and reduce
muscle load, such as shoes, chairs, desks and sidewalks. She
recommends incorporating as much natural movement into your
92

The Art of Being Human
everyday life as possible. Replace that short drive with a nice walk or
run. Even better, run it barefoot. Even better than that, get off the
sidewalk and let your feet and legs receive the rich movement
nutrients of balancing along uneven surfaces with small surprises at
every step.
Recent headlines point out that "sitting is the new smoking," with
consequences for your health that are worse than smoking. The
problem is that many people are replacing sitting with standing by
using standing desks, but this is only slightly better than sitting.
"Standing is the new sitting," Bowman says. We need to move.
A steady diet of rich and varied movements will strengthen your
full body and bring it into alignment. When your body is in
alignment, your muscles can work together with your joints and the
elastic power of your tendons to get the most out of every
movement. Tom Myers, an expert in human anatomy, suggests it
might be worth considering the entire human body not as a collection
of 600 muscles, but just one, held together by a stretchy rubbery
tissue connected throughout your body known as the fascia. The
fascia is "a crisscross of fibers and cables, an endless circulatory
system of strength," he told Chris MacDougal. "Your body is rigged
like a compound archery bow ... left foot to the right hip, right hip to
the left shoulder, and it's tougher than any muscle." Such power is
the result of millions of years of evolution. Our bodies are exquisitely
crafted for complex, precise, and powerful movements such as
running long distances, throwing with great precision, and fine tool
making. Yet few humans ever utilize even a fraction of this potential,
and the potential withers before it can be materialized.
RECLAIMING OUR HUMAN POTENTIAL
French Naval Officer Georges Hebert traveled the world and
noticed that he found the fittest and most capable people in the most
remote French colonies. Of the indigenous people of Africa and the
mountain tribes of Vietnam, he famously noted that "Their bodies
93

Michael Wesch
were splendid, flexible, nimble, skillful, enduring, resistant, and yet
they had no other tutor in Gymnastics but their lives in Nature." He
found strong, fit women in such places that assured him that
gendered differences in strength were largely cultural.
In 1902, he was stationed at Martinique when a violent volcano
eruption turned the normally idyllic island retreat into a living hell. A
black cloud moved out from the volcano at 420 mph, and
superheated steam of over 1,000 degrees shot into the nearby city of
Saint-Pierre, killing 30,000, the entire population of the city, in a
matter of minutes. There were only two survivors in the main city.
Thousands continued to fight for their lives where the initial blast
had spared them. It was a horror of hot steam, scorched earth, and
fiery rain, with pit vipers slithering violently about as they were
chased off the mountain by the coming heat.
Hebert's job was to go into that hell and rescue as many people as
possible. He coordinated the rescue of over 700. Afterwards, he
would reflect on what allowed some people to survive while others
perished. He learned that those who survived had a remarkable
capacity to move spontaneously and creatively to avoid danger, while
those who perished simply froze in fear and hopelessness.
Driven by a desire to train people for future calamities, he
dedicated himself to understanding human movement. He watched
children play and identified "10 natural utilities" (walking, running,
crawling, climbing, balancing, jumping, swimming, throwing, lifting,
and fighting), and created outdoor training facilities where people
could practice these basic skills. They looked like playgrounds for
adults. He had one firm rule: No competing. He felt that competition
would encourage people away from true fitness. Once people start
competing, they start focusing on specializing some movements over
others, and end up out of balance and unable to perform with the
spontaneity and creativity of our full human potential.
He called his method "methode naturelle," the natural method,
and it was based on one simple mantra: "be fit to be useful." Hebert
saw no use in appearing physically fit, with large biceps and large
94

The Art of Being Human
chest muscles. He simply wanted his navy recruits and anyone else
who used the method to be able to perform when it mattered.
Though he was averse to competition, he wanted to prove the worth
of his methods, so he put a bunch of ordinary navy recruits through
the program and soon had them performing as well as world class
decathletes.
He also released a short film demonstrating his own talents. In
the film, he leaps out of his dining room chair, runs outside, and
scales a 30-foot tree in seconds, leaps down from branch to branch,
and then proceeds to climb up the sides of buildings with equal
speed, first by himself and then with a child on his back. He then
races to catch a moving train and leaps off of the moving train from a
towering bridge into the water below.
Unfortunately, all of his recruits died, along with his method, in
the grim and deadly days of World War One. By the end of the
Second World War, the methods were all but forgotten.
As Europe and America rebuilt into increasingly post- industrial
economies with more and more jobs that required sitting for long
hours, people sought the most efficient ways possible to exercise,
trying to squeeze their daily dose of movement into smaller time
frames and smaller spaces. Specialized weight machines, treadmills,
and stationary bikes transformed gyms into big business where
steroid-injected hard-bodied men and impossibly skinny women were
the icons of good health. (Think back to the "Nacirema.")
The machines are not designed to make us useful. They are
designed to shape our bodies toward cultural ideals that are displays
of superficial fitness rather than true health and wellbeing. Women
are encouraged to lose weight, so they tend to focus on fat-burning
aerobic exercises rather than strength and agility. Men are encouraged
to build broad shoulders and large chests, so they focus on lifting
heavy weights with their upper bodies, often losing mobility in their
shoulders and making them more prone to injury and less able to do
basic human movements.
95

Michael Wesch
Many of our gym exercises pull our bodies more and more out of
alignment, like the floppy fins of SeaWorld. Overwork your chest,
and your shoulders shift forward. Artificially isolate your quads, and
you create imbalances in your legs that can lead to knee problems. A
healthy, functional body is a body that is aligned through a healthy
mix of diverse movements.
The worst effect of this focus on appearances is that the body
itself becomes alienated from our being. It becomes an object to be
manipulated and shaped to fit this ideal, rather than an integral part
of our being. We focus on how we look rather than the simple joy of
moving.
Recently, Hebert's methods are being rediscovered and
reinvented in a number of different movements. Free-running
parkour groups are spreading all over the world and look to Hebert
as one of their founding fathers, taking his mantra of "be fit to be
useful" as a core gospel. Erwan Le Corre, founder of movant, is
perhaps the most dedicated student of the method. He tried to track
down any remaining ancestors of Hebert's method, and then set
about immersing himself in studying those who had inspired Hebert.
Ido Portal, who studies movement practices all over the world –
from Afro-Brazilian Copoeira to the many martial arts of Asia –
incorporates a vast range of movements into his everyday life to
explore the boundaries of human movement potential. Portal sees
this as a deeply human pursuit, tied to our evolution. "Movement
complexity is by far the reason why we became human," he says,
"The reason for our brain development is related to movement
complexity."
Today there is a new emergence of natural training methods
around the world often going under the name "functional fitness."
Cross Fit, the world's most successful and fastest-growing fitness
movement, encourages their trainers to eliminate mirrors and focus
on helping people be more functional rather than just looking good.
Others, like the BarStarrz and other "body weight warriors" are
96

The Art of Being Human
finding ways to use nothing but their own body weight and the
objects in their environment for their training.
By 2015, America's fastest growing sport was obstacle racing.
American Ninja Warrior became one of America's most popular TV
shows, and hundreds of thousands tested themselves in Tough
Mudders, Warrior Dashes, and Spartan Races, intense obstacle races
that require a diverse array of human movements and endurance.
Though there is a competition element to many of these events, most
people are simply there to see if they can complete the course, and
cooperation is often essential. Many of the obstacles cannot be
overcome without the aid of others. Once someone receives aid, they
usually pay it forward. And as they do, they seek to find that same joy
in moving through the world that Hebert witnessed around in remote
African villages, that Coach Vigil saw as the Raramuri ran, and that I
saw among my friends in New Guinea.
THE POWER TO CHANGE OUR HABITS
By my mid-30s, I was well on my way to falling victim to any one
of the many mismatch diseases that plague our time, and I had
already developed several diseases of captivity. I could not sit in a
squat. I could not even run. At 29, I tore my meniscus and developed
a mysterious hip pain that no doctor could explain. Every time I tried
to go for a run, I would wake up the next day with a swollen knee
and an immovable leg. So I gave it up. I became mostly sedentary,
dedicating myself to my work. By 35, my body had adapted to life in
a chair. My weight was creeping upward. I couldn't touch my toes. A
couple of flights of stairs started to feel like a chore. I also started
developing a number of other health issues, such as high cholesterol
and high blood pressure. Our bodies not only evolved to run, throw,
and squat, we had to conserve energy every chance we could, so we
evolved to rest and seek comfort. I found comfort in abundance and
gorged on it.
97

Michael Wesch
Fortunately, we not only developed adaptations to seek comfort,
store fat, and feel stress, we also developed the power to intentionally
reflect on our activities and change them. The core of our humanity,
the ability to ask questions, make connections, and try new things
offers a way out.
These abilities are reflected in the evolution of the brain. The
oldest part of the brain lies at the core of the brain at the stem: the
basal ganglia. Named the "reptilian complex" by neuroscientist Paul
MacLean, it evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. It guides our
basic autonomic body processes and is responsible for instinctual
cravings and behaviors. On top of this is what MacLean calls the
"paleomammalian complex," sometimes simplified as the "mammal"
brain. It evolved along with the first mammals and is responsible for
emotions, long-term memory, and more complex behaviors.
Surrounding all of this is the newest part of the brain, the neocortex.
It is responsible for higher order cognition, complex behavior,
language, and spatial reasoning. In humans, the neocortex has grown
to become 76% of the brain.
As our neocortex expanded, we became less and less controlled
by nature and more by culture, less by impulse and more by reason,
less by instinct and more by habit.
Habit is the compromise between being completely controlled by
our instinct and being completely free to make intentional decisions
about whatever we want to do. It is the trade-off we have made
between instinct and reason in order to maintain speed and
efficiency. Though we have become more and more adept at making
complex decisions, it would be too slow and inefficient to have to
make decisions about every single thing we ever did on a day-to-day
basis. To improve speed and efficiency, our brains developed the
ability to do our most repetitive routines without making any
decisions at all. We could do them by habit.
Habit formation works by passing control over the most routine
behaviors to the more primitive basal ganglia. As we do a routine
over and over again our brain can determine what prompts the
98

The Art of Being Human
routine to begin ("the cue") and what prompts it to end ("the
reward") and creates a "chunk" of automatic behavior. Brushing your
teeth is a "chunk." You get the cue (time for bed) and without
wrestling with any complex decisions simply go through the motions
of putting the toothpaste on the brush, brushing your teeth, and
rinsing the brush. "Chunking" allows complex activities to be
controlled by the super-efficient "lizard brain" of the basil ganglia.
Habits were essential to our evolutionary success, but as we
know, not all habits are good. Because habits are controlled by the
same region of the brain as our instincts and impulses, some habits
can feel like unchangeable urges that are out of our control, but we
can change them.
In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg tells the story of a woman
named Lisa, an overweight smoker who struggled to hold a job and
pay off her debts. When her husband left her for another woman, she
hit rock-bottom. Alone, depressed and without any feeling of selfworth,
she decided she needed some kind of goal to straighten out
her life. She set the goal of trekking across the deserts of Egypt. She
had no idea if such a trip were even possible, but she did know that
the only way to make such an arduous journey would be to quit
smoking. She gave herself one year to prepare.
The only significant intentional decision she made was to quit
smoking, and she did so by going for a jog each time she felt the urge
to light up. As Duhigg points out though, this one simple change
changed everything. It "changed how she ate, worked, slept, saved
money, scheduled her workdays, planned for the future, and so on."
She made that trip to Egypt, and within four years she was a happily
engaged home-owner and marathon runner with a steady job as a
graphic designer.
The key to changing our habits is understanding how they work.
A habit is made up of three parts, which together make up what
Duhigg calls "the habit loop." First, there is a cue – a trigger that tells
your brain to follow a chunk of automatic routine behavior. The
second piece is the routine itself. The final piece is the reward. If the
99

Michael Wesch
reward is strong, the habit is reinforced and becomes more and more
engrained and automatic.
What allowed Lisa to change is that she did not attempt to
change the cue (the urge to light up). Cues come from outside of our
control. They are in our environment or deeply embedded in our
brain. After years of smoking she could not remove the urge or sit
idle and simply resist it. Her brain was telling her that she had to act,
so she did. But she changed how she acted. She replaced the "chunk"
or routine of smoking with running. Importantly, running offered her
brain a sufficient reward – a runner's high, a feeling of good health,
and a sense of accomplishment – so the new routine received
additional reinforcement each time she did it. Eventually, it became a
habit and she no longer needed to make a conscious decision to go
running. It became automatic.
To change a habit, you have to study the cues that trigger the
habit and understand the true reward that you seek. For example, if
you have a habit of eating ice cream every night with your friends, it
might not just be the satiating taste of ice cream that you crave. The
true reward might be that it's a break from the stress of studying, or
time out with friends. Carefully note the time and circumstances of
your next ice cream craving. Are you stressed or overwhelmed by
your work? Are you feeling lonely? Are you hungry? Do an
experiment to see if just a walk down the hall and a chat with friends
fulfills your needs, or if you are just hungry, grab a healthy snack and
see if that gets you past the urge. Whatever creates a sufficient reward
can become your new habit.
Sometimes you have to do more and actually change the
environment around you. Make it easy for yourself to engage in good
habits and more difficult to engage in bad habits.
For example, as I adapted to my inactive life of chairs and cars
that was leading to the demise of my health, my bike ended up stored
away on a hard-to-reach hook in the garage overhanging my car. In
this environment, the bike was simply too far out of reach to seem
like a reasonable possibility. Removing the bike would require
100

The Art of Being Human
backing the car out, getting out a ladder, and then trying to keep my
weak and stiff body balanced on the ladder while lifting the bike off
the hook and down onto the ground. It would have never happened
had my neighbor not given me a new bike seat for my two-year-old
old son that I felt obligated to try out to show that I appreciated the
gift.
After trying out the bike seat, I was too lazy to put the bike back
on the hook, and just stuffed the bike back into the garage behind the
car. Suddenly there was a shift in my environment. When I walked
out to my car to drive to work the next morning, the bike was behind
the car. As I was moving the bike out of the way, I remembered the
fun I'd had on it with my son the day before, and the next thing I
knew, I was riding the bike to work.
I parked the bike behind the car again that day and every day.
Every morning for several weeks I would struggle with the decision
of whether or not to bike or take the car. Taking the car involved
moving the bike out of the way, driving the car out of the garage, and
then re-parking the bike in the garage before leaving for work. It was
complicated, so the bike kept winning. Within a few weeks, I wasn't
even asking myself whether I should take the bike or the car. It was a
habit. And it stuck. No amount of snow or cold weather could break
it. The next year I didn't even bother buying a parking pass. Two
years later I sold the car.
I started looking at my other habits. At work, I often found
myself checking Facebook and cruising the Internet. I found that the
cue was stress. Each time I felt stressed and overwhelmed, I sought
relief on the Internet. I decided to replace the routine of Internet
surfing with push-ups. So each time I started feeling stressed, I did
push-ups. It cleared my head, gave me a quick rush of endorphins,
and I could get back to work.
I started making a habit of breaking habits and trying new things.
My body started to transform. Before long, I looked and felt as good
as I had when I was twenty years old. But soon I surpassed even that
and started feeling stronger, lighter, and more agile than I ever
101

Michael Wesch
thought possible. I started thinking back to my friends in New
Guinea and the remarkable things they could do. Could I do those
things? I wondered.
I learned to do handstands, then some basic gymnastics, and then
turned to people like Erwan Le Corre and Ido Portal, who were
exploring the limits and potential of human movement.
As I was writing this chapter, I started another new habit:
running. I made a simple rule for myself: If I'm taking the kids, take the
bike. If not, run. I strapped on a backpack and started running
everywhere. I ran slow, easy, and smooth, using the light barefoot
step of our ancestors that I had seen in New Guinea and that
MacDougal saw among the Raramuri. My body immediately began to
adapt. My muscles ached for a few days, but quickly grew stronger to
adjust to the new loads. Within just a few weeks it was a habit. I
didn't even bother to go to the garage anymore to grab the bike. I just
stepped out into the cold morning air and let it rip.
I was most concerned about how the experiment would affect my
bad hip and knee. As I expected, they ached through the first two
weeks, and I was sure that I would be giving up on running for good
after 28 days. But by week three, the pain seemed to be subsiding.
By Day 28 I felt so good I couldn't stop. I kept running. I had
come to enjoy the freedom of moving through the world without a
car or bike to worry about. Everything I needed was always right with
me. I felt free, fast, light, and agile. And I enjoyed the steady stream
of endorphins that came with the ongoing "runner's high" I received
in little bits throughout a day of running here and there.
One day, while listening to a good book on my headphones, I ran
for 90 minutes – only stopping because I had to run to a meeting. I
was sure that after a long run like that, I would soon be feeling the
familiar hip and knee pain that would leave me immobile for a day or
so. But I woke up the next day with no pain. I started running longer
and longer distances, blissfully absorbing audiobooks as I ran. Using
the light, elastic gate of our ancestors, I skittered along trails just as
my friends in New Guinea do. Even after a 20-mile day, I didn't feel
102

The Art of Being Human
tired or winded. Instead I felt a blissful calmness. I started wondering
where my limit might be.
So one ordinary Wednesday, I set off running into a brisk 36-
degree morning. My feet skittered across the earth with ease, and I
felt as if I were being carried gently along by the continuous whirl of
my feet doing what they were meant to do. My breath was steady and
easy. I lost myself in the deep thought of a good book. Three hours
later, I noticed that my friend's class was getting out, so I stopped in
to visit with him. I had already run 18 miles and I wanted to know,
Could I run a marathon?
After a brief chat with my friend, I hit the trail again. The next 8
miles were as blissful as the first 18. It was a strange experience. I
have been enculturated to believe that running 26.2 miles is almost
superhuman, and most certainly extreme and dangerous. I have been
led to believe that you have to be crazy to do it, that you only do it
when you really have "something to prove." I would never have
thought that it could be fun, enjoyable, or relaxing.
Relaxing? Strange as it may seem, that is what I felt above all other
feelings as I finished. I felt deeply relaxed. My friends were amazed,
and said they couldn't believe that I was able to train for a marathon.
I felt confused by the word "train." At no point did I ever feel like I
was "training" for anything. I realized that instead of "training," I had
simply slowly been changing my habits over the past six years. I went
from a lifestyle that involved a lot of sitting in cars, at desks, and on
sofas to a lifestyle of constant movement. By the time I ran the
marathon, I was habitually moving a minimum of 8 to 10 miles per
day.
The best way I can describe it is that I just got into the habit of
moving, and one day I just happened to run 26 miles.
103

Michael Wesch
LEARN MORE
Natural Born Heroes by Chris McDougall
Move Your DNA by Katy Bowman
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
104

The Art of Being Human
Challenge Three: The 28 Day Challenge
Your challenge is to try something new or change a habit by
dedicating yourself to doing it every day for 28 days.
Objective: Practice trying new things, experience more, and to reflect
more deeply on how humans learn and create new habits, as well as
how you, specifically, can better identify what conditions or
techniques work best for you when you are trying to learn something
new or change your habits.
Step 1: Choose something you would like to do (or stop doing) over
the next 28 days. Take a picture of yourself doing this thing and post
it to Instagram #anth101challenge3
Ideas: Slow Media Diet, Slow Carb Diet, running, a new instrument,
movement, exercise, gratitude, writing, or stop doing something (smoking,
sugar, alcohol, video games, Netflix, porn)
Step 2: Post regular updates of your progress. Post videos of your
progress if possible. It is always fun to really see how much you have
learned.
Step 3: At the end of 28 days, reflect on the following:
How successful were you?
Under what conditions were you most successful?
What were your barriers to success
How can you get past them?
What did you learn about how you learn?
For details and inspiration go to anth101.com/challenge3
105

Michael Wesch
Lesson Four
Language
Our most basic assumptions are embedded in the basic elements of our
everyday lives.
106

The Art of Being Human
THE POWER OF LANGUAGE
On her first day as a sign-language interpreter for a local
community college, Susan Schaller spotted a deaf man sitting alone
and intensively studying the people around him in a Reading Skills
class. She introduced herself with a greeting gesture and her name
sign, as if to say, "Hi, my name is Susan." He copied her, as if to say
back, "Hi, my name is Susan."
What's your name?" she asked. "What's your name?" he
responded. He studied her carefully, copying her every move, and
asking for her approval with his eyes. She soon realized that this 27-
year-old man, named Ildefonso, had no concept of language. "We
were only inches apart, but we might as well have been from different
planets; it seemed impossible to meet."
She could not help but recognize his desire to learn, and felt
called to teach him. It was long, arduous, and frustrating work.
Nothing she did seemed to break through.
Eventually, she settled on the idea of doing an "imaginary
Ildefonso skit" in which she would talk to an empty chair as if
107

Michael Wesch
Ildefonso was sitting there, then pop over to the other chair to
respond, thereby modeling a conversation between herself and an
imaginary Ildefonso. It was a bizarre scene and felt strange. Week
after week she had these imaginary conversations. "I began to worry
about my sanity," she writes.
After a grueling, mind-numbing, and apparently hopeless session,
Ildefonso suddenly perked up. "The whites of his eyes expanded as if
in terror," Schaller writes. He was having a breakthrough. He sat still,
as if pondering the revelation, and then excitedly started looking
around the room, "slowly at first, then hungrily, he took in everything
as though he had never seen anything before." He started slapping
his hands down on objects and looking for Susan to respond.
"Table," she signed as he slapped his hand on the table. "Book," she
signed as he touched a book, and then "door," "clock," and "chair" in
rapid succession has he pointed around the room. Then he stopped,
collapsed his head into his arms folded on the table, and wept.
"He had entered the universe of humanity, discovered the
communion of minds. He now knew that he and a cat and the table
all had names ... and he could see the prison where he had existed
alone, shut out of the human race for twenty- seven years."
LANGUAGE LEARNING IN NEW GUINEA
When I first arrived in the rainforests of New Guinea, I saw three
things: trees, bushes, and grass. Of course, there was a wide range of
different types of trees, bushes, and grasses, but having no language
for them, they disappeared into a large mass of stimuli that I simply
knew as "the forest." I had no language to make sense of what I was
seeing – no web of meanings to create the background upon which
what I saw could take on some significant definition. I could not tell
food from foul, or medicine from poison, and I was completely
mystified by the meanings my friends could glean from the forest as
we walked. With their eyes always scanning their surroundings, they
were constantly reacting to the messages they could see and hear,
108

The Art of Being Human
variously lighting up with delight and sighing with disappointment,
laughing, groaning, shaking their head this way and that as they went.
Anxious to explore their world of meanings, I set about learning
the language. The first phrase I could identify seemed to be a
common greeting, as I heard it over and over again every morning as
we watched people stroll by the house on their way down the
mountain toward their gardens. "Neliyongbipkatopbani!" they would
sing out as they passed. I wrote it down and repeated it to my brother
Lazarus, asking him what it means.
"It means, I am going to the garden." he said. "Great!" I thought to
myself, a subject, verb, and an object. I could use this to start
unlocking the language using a technique we call frame substitution.
With frame substitution, the researcher uses a known phrase as a
"frame" and just tweaks ("substitutes") one part of it to see what
changes.
"How do you say, He is going to the garden?" I asked.
"Eliyongbipkatopbana." The words were too fast for me to decipher
where one word stopped and another began, so I ran them all
together in my notebook.
A pattern was emerging. The change in subject from "he" to "I"
had changed the beginning and end of the phrase
(Neliyongbipkatopbani vs. Eliyongbipkatopbana).
I sat still and pondered the revelation for a moment and then
excitedly started asking for more words. I felt like Ildefonso
awakening to a new world. I was having a breakthrough. I excitedly
started scribbling notes into my notebook. Other bits of language I
had recorded suddenly made sense. It was as if had broken a code
and a world of mystery was revealing itself to me. Like Ildefonso
pointing in rapid succession to tables, books, doors, clocks, and
chairs, I also started gathering new terms using the framework of this
sentence as a starting point. I asked how one would say "she is going
to the garden" and found the beginning and end changed again. I
started rattling off different subjects, from he and she and on to they
and we.
109

Michael Wesch
Then I was ready to discover the pronoun and verb ending for
"you."
"How would you say, 'You are going to the garden?'" I asked.
"Neliyongbipkatopbani," he answered, which was already
established as "I am going to the garden."
"No, no." I corrected, "You are going to the garden."
"Neliyongbipkatopbani," he responded again.
"No, no!" I responded in frustration. "You! You are going to the
garden."
"No, no," he said. "I'm staying right here. You are still very
confused."
WHAT IS A WORD?
One of the biggest challenges of learning a language among
people who do not read and write is that they do not necessarily
think about their language as a collection of discrete words in the
same way that we do.
Likewise, one of the biggest challenges of learning a language
among people who do read and write is that they don't not always talk
like they write. Learning the written form may be entirely different
from learning how to speak. One of comedian George Carlin's
favorite English words was "ommina," as in "Ommina go catch the
bus and head home." Humans can make about 4,000 different
sounds. About 400 of these are used in languages around the world,
with most languages using about 40 different sounds. The sounds a
language uses are called phonemes. These sounds include consonants
and vowels, and in some languages there are also clicks and tones.
If you do not learn a phoneme when you are young, it can be
difficult to speak and understand later in life. English speakers
struggle to understand the tones in a tonal language. Japanese
speakers often struggle to pronounce the "r" sound used in many
languages. And the plethora of unique "clicks" used in Khoisan
languages of southern Africa are difficult for everyone except the
110

The Art of Being Human
Khoisan. English-speakers learning Korean often struggle not only to
say certain words but also to distinguish words like pul and phul,
which both simply sound like "pull" to an English speaker, but phul
uses an aspirated 'p' thereby distinguishing the word as "grass" rather
than "fire."
Sometimes these phonemic differences create unique abilities in
the cultures and speakers that use them. The Piraha of the Amazon
use just 11 sounds, including three tones. The heavy use of these
tones allow the Piraha to whistle messages to one another through
the rainforest across great distances. In West Africa, speakers of tonal
languages can use "talking drums" that allow the drummer to vary the
pitch to mimic speech and send messages up to five miles. Tonal
languages might also have an effect on human abilities. In one study,
Diana Deutsch found that Mandarin speakers were nine times more
likely than English speakers to have perfect pitch, the remarkable
ability to precisely name any pitch, whether it comes from a piano or
the hum of an air conditioner.
Though the local language contained a few new phonemes that
made it difficult for me to learn, I was fortunate that many of the
people in the village spoke Tok Pisin, a creole that had developed
over the past few centuries of contact with Europeans. The language
is a mix made up of mostly English-derived words along with some
German and local words. I had no trouble saying "You are going to
the garden" in Tok Pisin (you simply say "yu go long gaden.") Tok Pisin
has become a national lingua franca, facilitating communication for
speakers of over 800 different languages in Papua New Guinea. With
a relatively small vocabulary made up of many familiar words, I was
able to converse in the language in a month and became fluent soon
after that.
But it was the local language that enchanted me. As psychologist
Lera Boroditsky notes, "If people learn another language, they
inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world." I sensed
that I was on the verge of a new way of seeing the world.
111

Michael Wesch
I changed tactics and returned to the foundations of frame
substitution to build on what I already knew. "How would you say,
'he is going to the house'" I asked. "Emiamkatopbani." Now the code
was breaking again. I noticed that the only change between that
phrase and the phrase for going to the garden was am vs. yongbip, and
could conclude that these were the words for house and garden,
respectively. I excitedly asked for more and started filling my
notebook. I reveled in my new language abilities. Mastering a
common greeting like this gave me something to hold onto in what
was otherwise a sea of unfamiliar sounds. But then a new mystery
emerged the next morning. A man walked by my house as I was
sitting on the veranda and said, "Neli yongbip kametbani." By the time
I unraveled what he meant by the statement, I was forced to realize
that they were not just speaking differently. They were thinking
differently too.
TRANSCENDING SPACE AND TIME
Vivian: Have you ever transcended space and time?
Edward: Yes. ... No. Uh, time not space. ... No, I don't know
what you're talking about.
- I Heart Huckabees
The man was passing from the other direction, heading uphill,
and that turned out to be the key difference. Kametbani indicated
that he was going uphill, while katopbani indicated going downhill.
Using frame substitution I found a vast collection of words indicating
specific directions. This does not seem particularly different from
English, in which we might say "I'm heading down there / up there /
over there / etc." The key difference is not that we can say these
things. It is that they have to. The direction indicator is built right into
their grammar, so they have to say which direction they are facing or
going every time they say hello. In this way, it is similar to
Pormpuraaw, spoken by Australian Aborigines on the northern tip of
112

The Art of Being Human
Queensland, Australia. As Lera Boroditsky says, "If you don't know
which way is which, you literally can't get past hello."
In some languages these directional orientations take the place of
left and right, so a speaker might say, "your north shoe is untied" or
even "your north-northwest shoe is untied." As a result, people who
speak languages like this exhibit the uncanny capacity for dead
reckoning. They know exactly which direction is which at every
moment of the day. Even small children know exactly what direction
they are facing, even in unfamiliar territory after long travels. Stephen
Levinson recounts that a speaker of Tzeltal (a Mayan language in the
Mexican state of Chiapas) was blindfolded and spun around over 20
times in a dark house, yet he still knew which way was which.
I knew very little about all this at the time. I only knew that my
friends in New Guinea were experiencing the world differently than I
was. I felt much like Wilhelm von Humboldt must have felt when, in
the early 1800s, he started to realize that American Indian languages
had radically different grammatical structures from European
languages. "The difference between languages is not only in sounds
and signs but in worldview," he proclaimed. While he recognized that
any thought could be expressed in any language, he became keenly
aware of the fact that a language shapes thought by "what it
encourages and stimulates its speakers to do from its own inner
force." In other words, if you have to figure out what direction you
are facing every time you greet someone, you get pretty good at
telling direction.
Enchanted by the possibilities of new ways of thinking, linguists
and anthropologists set about documenting undocumented grammars
in earnest. By the early 1900s, Edward Sapir emerged as one of their
most prominent leaders. "What fetters the mind and benumbs the
spirit is ever the dogged acceptance of absolutes," Sapir wrote in his
Introduction to the Study of Speech. Like Humboldt, Sapir saw a path
toward new ways of seeing and thinking about the world through the
documentation of languages. Sapir championed the idea as the
"principle of linguistic relativity." Much as Einstein's Theory of
113

Michael Wesch
Relativity has done, Sapir thought linguistic relativity could disrupt
our ways of seeing and understanding the world.
Sapir's most famous student and colleague was Benjamin Whorf,
a genius fire inspector with a degree in chemical engineering who was
fascinated by languages. While working as a fire inspector, he noticed
that several tragic fires were caused by people carelessly smoking next
to "empty" gas barrels. Of course, the "empty" barrels were actually
full of highly flammable gas vapor.
Most famously, Whorf became interested in Hopi concepts of
time. He noted that in English we talk about time as a "thing" and
objectify it as seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc. It was a brilliant
analysis starting from the insight that time is not really a "thing" but
is simply the experience of duration, of a "getting later." The Hopi,
he argued, have "no words, grammatical forms, constructions or
expressions that refer directly to what we call 'time.'" He tied this into
a broader observation of how our grammar shapes how we talk and
think. For example, our grammar obliges us to provide a subject for
every verb, so we say "it rains" or "the light flashes" when in fact
neither the rain nor the light even exist without the action itself.
When a light flashes the Hopi simply say rehpi. Whorf would go on to
claim that our grammar made it difficult for us to understand
Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which merges time and space, matter
and energy, but make it easy to understand Newton, in which objects
do specific actions. He suggested that if science had emerged within
an Amerindian language, the Theory of Relativity might have been
discovered much sooner.
Unfortunately, his claims about Hopi time may have gone too far.
The idea that the Hopi have no concepts of time was discounted in
the opening quote of Ekkehart Malotki's comprehensive book on
Hopi Time, in which Malotki quotes a Hopi man using several
concepts of time that Whorf assumed did not exist:
Then indeed, the following day, quite early in the morning at the hour when people
pray to the sun, around that time then, he woke up the girl again.
114

The Art of Being Human
Whorf fell into disrepute among many linguists after this, but
nobody expressed the core insight that language can shape thought
more eloquently or forcefully. His works revealed what Stephen
Levinson called a "seductive, revolutionary set of ideas." Levinson
goes on to note that "many eminent researchers in the language
sciences will confess that they were first drawn into the study of
language through the ideas associated with Benjamin Lee Whorf."
As linguists have turned away from Whorf, what was once known
as the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" or as Sapir dubbed it, "the Principle
of Linguistic Relativity," is being re-shaped as what Guy Deutscher
has called the Boas-Jakobsen principle. Deutscher points out that
unlike Whorf, who pushed the notion that language shapes thought
too far, Boas and Jakobsen championed a more tempered approach
that, as Jakobsen summarized, "languages differ essentially in what
they must convey and not in what they may convey." In this way,
language shapes how we think by forcing us to think about certain
things over and over again – like direction for my friends in New
Guinea.
Over the past 30 years, careful controlled experiments have
shown that language does indeed shape how we think. For example,
in one task researchers asked participants to look at three different
toy animals in a row setting on a table. The animals might be placed
from left to right, facing "downhill" for example. Participants have to
memorize the order of the animals and then turn around and place
the animals in the same order on another table behind them. This
forces the participant to make a decision about which answer is
"right." One right answer would be to place the animals from left to
right, but now left to right is not "downhill," it is "uphill." In such
experiments, almost all speakers of Tzeltal (a language that requires
speakers to know which direction they are facing) chose to orient the
animals from right to left in a "downhill" orientation, while almost all
Dutch speakers did the opposite.
115

Michael Wesch
Though this may seem like a minor difference, Lera Boroditsky
points out that how we think about space can affect how we think
about other things as well. "People rely on their spatial knowledge to
build other, more complex, more abstract representations," she notes,
"such as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, and
emotions." For example, the Kuuk Thaayore of northern Queensland
in Australia arrange time from east to west rather than left to right.
When they were asked to arrange cards that indicated a clear
temporal sequence such as a man aging or a banana being eaten, they
arranged the cards from east to west, regardless of which direction
they were facing. Mandarin speakers think of time as moving
downward so next month is the "down month" and last month is the
"up month."
Beyond time and space there are other interesting grammatical
differences across languages that may shape how we think, but these
domains have not been investigated thoroughly. For example, the
Matses of the Amazon rainforest have the most complex system of
verb forms that linguists call "evidentials." They operate much like
tenses but require speakers to indicate precisely how they know what
they know. In Matses, if you want to say, "he is going to the garden"
you have to indicate whether you know this by direct experience, you
are inferring it from clear evidence, you are conjecturing based on
previous patterns, or you know it from hearsay. In the West we have
a vast complicated philosophical field called Epistemology to explore
how we know what we know. The Matses may be master
epistemologists just by virtue of how they are required to speak.
WHERE THE SKY IS NOT BLUE
That our grammar affects how we think is now well- established,
but what about our words? In one famous example, often mistakenly
attributed to Whorf, the Eskimo are said to have hundreds of words
for snow. This is not exactly true on a number of counts. First, there
is no single Eskimo language, and many languages spoken in the
116

The Art of Being Human
region use polysynthetic word structures that allow them to make an
infinite number of words from any root. For example, a complex
phrase like "Would you like to go window shopping with me" can be
expressed in just one word. In such a system, there are endless
possibilities building from the root words for snow (of which there
are only two). However, linguist David Harrison notes that the Yupik
identify at least 99 distinct sea ice formations including several that
are essential to life and death on the ice, such as Nuyileq, which
indicates crushed ice that is beginning to spread out and is dangerous
to walk on. It should not be surprising that the Yupik would have so
many words for sea ice formations. Of course, an avid skier also has
several words for snow and ice that are unknown to most English
speakers, such as chunder, powder, moguls, zipper bumps, and
sastrugi. Just as we learned in the previous section, our language does
not limit us from perceiving new things and inventing words for
them, but once we have a word for something and start habitually
using that word, it is much easier to see it.
I experienced this myself in New Guinea. As I learned the
language, the forest came alive for me in the same way that the whole
world came alive for Ildefonso as he discovered language. The more
words I learned, the more I came to see and understand the
significance of the world around me. The monotonous diet, which
had consisted of little more than taro, sweet potato, and bananas, was
greatly enhanced as I came to recognize over thirty types of taro and
sweet potato, and over fifty types of banana, each with its own
distinct texture and flavor.
Sometimes, the words people use to describe the world clearly
reflect and support the social structure and core values of their
culture. One particularly well-documented example is in the domain
of kinship terms. For example, Hawaiians use same word (makuahine)
for mother as they do for aunt, a reflection of the importance they
place on family and their tendency to live in extended families. If you
were born into a culture where wealth is passed through the father's
line (patrilineal systems) you might refer to your father's sister as
117

Michael Wesch
"mother-in-law," indicating that her children (your "cousins" in our
system) are suitable marriage partners. This form of cousin marriage
can be advantageous because it keeps the wealth within the
patrilineage. If you marry outside the patrilineage, the family wealth
would need to be divided. Our own system, which distinguishes one's
closest blood relatives (mother, father, brother, sister) from more
distant relatives (aunts, uncles and cousins), reflects and supports a
social structure and core values emphasizing independent nuclear
families.
The core idea here is that we use our words to divide and
categorize the world in certain ways which then influence how we see
and act in the world. But how far does this go? For example, if we
imagined a culture that had no word for blue, would the people of
that culture experience "blueness"? Could they see it? Would they see
it just as you or I see it?
This is the question that struck William Gladstone in 1858 when
he noticed something peculiar about Homer's epic classics, The Iliad
and The Odyssey. There were very few color terms throughout both
texts, and the few times that colors were mentioned, they seemed a
little off. Honey is described as green, the daytime sky is black, and
the sea is described as the color of wine. There seemed to be no word
for what we would normally call "blue." After careful study,
Gladstone came to the conclusion that the Greeks might have seen
the world very differently from us, perhaps mostly in black and white
with the occasional shade of red.
Nine years later, Lazarus Geiger found that the color blue was
also missing from the texts of ancient India, and from biblical
Hebrew. He attempted to unveil the deep history of numerous
languages and found that the word for blue was a relatively recent
invention in each one. Furthermore, he noticed that the order in
which colors were added to a language seemed to follow a universal
pattern. First a language would have words for black and white, then
red, then yellow or green, then yellow and green, and finally blue.
Over the next twenty years, anthropologists and missionaries
118

The Art of Being Human
gathered color terms from all over the world and the universal
pattern was confirmed.
Geiger wondered whether or not people without words for such
colors could see the colors or not. "Can the difference between them
and us be only in the naming," he wondered, "or in the perception
itself?" Do they really not see the color blue? Thus opened up to
science one of our favorite old philosophical nuts. Is the "blue" you see
the same "blue" that I see? Is it possible to know?
Ten years later the question was one of the hottest topics of the
age. Anatomist Frithiof Holmgren suspected that a deadly train crash
in 1875 was caused when the conductor failed to see and obey a red
stop light. He set about testing other conductors for color-blindness
and promoted the importance of color perception for international
safety. In this environment, Hugo Magnus suggested that colorblindness
was a vestige of relatively recent human abilities. The ability
of our retina to see colors had been evolving, he argued, and it would
continue to evolve. Red was the first color we saw because it was the
most intense, followed by yellow and green. He proposed that the
ability to see blue was a relatively recent human ability, and suggested
that so-called "primitive" tribes saw the world of color much as we
see it at twilight, with muted gradations and only the most intense
colors easily distinguished.
But color tests around the world failed to confirm that people of
different cultures varied in their ability to perceive color differences.
Nubians, Namibians, and Pacific Islanders had no trouble sorting and
matching color samples.
But there was still the mystery of why Homer would describe the
sea as "wine-dark" or honey as green, and why the word for blue
would be so late in coming in the evolution of languages.
Sometimes we have some basic assumptions built into our
questions that lead us astray. If you ask, "how did humankind's sense
of color evolve over the past 3,000 years since Homer?" then you are
already assuming that our sense of color has evolved. It is easy
enough to discard that assumption, but harder to see and discard a
119

Michael Wesch
much deeper assumption about the nature of color itself. We think of
colors in terms of hue, which is dependent on the color's wavelength
and is independent of its intensity or lightness. What is apparent now
is that many languages, including that of Homer's, were not
describing "color" as we think of it at all, but were instead describing
intensity. The Greeks did not classify colors by hue, but by darkness
and lightness. Kyaneos referred to darker colors such as dark blue,
dark green, violet, brown, and black while glaukos referred to lighter
colors such as light blue, light green, grey or yellow.
So why does "red" come first in the history of languages,
followed by yellow, green, and finally blue? We do not know for sure,
but there may be a mix of reasons both natural and cultural. Our
closest primate relatives show increased excitement around the color
red, which may signal danger (blood) or sex, and experiments with
humans also show physiological effects. Red is of great importance
symbolically in most cultures, and red dyes are the easiest to find and
manufacture, with most cultures having some source for red dye that
is often used in art and skin decoration. Yellow and green are
important in identifying the health and ripeness of many plants, and
yellow dyes are also fairly easy to find and manufacture. Blue is not
especially important or easy to find and manufacture. Indeed, blue
dyes do not appear until about three thousand years ago, and its rarity
conferred it a special status in early civilizations.
More importantly, some color words in other languages carry
other important meanings that can change how they are used. For
example, anthropologist Harold Conklin notes that the Hanunoo of
the Philippines say that the brown-colored section of freshly cut
bamboo is "green" since green is not exclusively a color term but a
label of freshness.
While it is now well-established that people of different cultures
can see all the same colors, there is some evidence that our color
words shape how we see them. For example, neuropsychologist Jules
Davidoff worked with the Hemba in Africa, who do not have a word
for blue. When he showed them 12 color samples, 11 that we would
120

The Art of Being Human
call "green" and 1 that we would call "blue," they could not
determine that the "blue" one was the odd one out. But, they have
many words for different shades of green, and when shown a pallet
of 12 green squares with one slightly different they immediately saw
the difference. English speakers cannot do this. (You can try at
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17970). His work suggests
that once we name a color, it is easier to notice it, and we often
collapse color differences toward our modal version of a color,
making it difficult to distinguish between different shades that match
the same category. In other words, when people who have no word
for blue look out at a sky that they categorize in the same color
category as black, the sky probably appears a bit darker than it does
to us.
METAPHORS BE WITH YOU
Though grammar and words can be shown to shape how we see
and think about the world, linguists George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson have proposed that the most profound influence on our
thought is at the level of metaphor. They point out that metaphors
are pervasive throughout our language and often unnoticed. For
example, we often unconsciously use the metaphor ARGUMENT IS
WAR to describe an argument. We say that claims are defended or
indefensible. We attack and demolish our opponents, shooting down their
points, hoping that we can win. To drive home the significance of this
metaphor, they ask us to consider what it would be like if we lived in
a culture that instead used an ARGUMENT IS A DANCE metaphor
in which the participants try to dance together, find the beauty in
each other's moves, and ultimately create something beautiful
together.
The key point of Lakoff and Johnson is not just that we use
metaphors in how we talk. It is that "human thought processes are
largely metaphorical." As Neil Postman notes, "A metaphor is not an
ornament. It is an organ of perception ... Is light a wave or a particle? Are
121

Michael Wesch
molecules like billiard balls or force fields? Is history unfolding according to some
instructions of nature or a divine plan?" In virtually every domain of our
lives and worldview, metaphors are operating, shaping our
perception.
Most of the metaphors we use in our thought are what they call
"dead" metaphors; that is, that we do not see them as metaphors at
all. Take for example the metaphorical concept that Michael Reddy
has called the "conduit metaphor," in which we think of ideas as
objects and words as containers for those ideas. We put ideas into the
containers (words) and send them (along a conduit) to other people.
After careful analysis, Reddy notes that about 70% of all expressions
we use about language are based on this metaphor. We say that we
have ideas, that sometimes they are hard to capture in words, and that
sometimes it is hard to get an idea across.
This metaphor lies at the heart of many "common sense" notions
of education, which, as it turns out, are incomplete and misguided.
The common-sense notion is that a teacher's job is to put ideas into
words and send them to the students, who then will have the ideas.
Massive lecture halls on college campuses have these assumptions
built right into them, with fixed stadium seating facing the front of
the room where the professor takes control of over a million points
of light on giant screens, all specifically designed to help the
professor "convey" the ideas into the heads of the students.
But this is not a complete picture of how learning works. Ideas
do not just flow into people's heads and fill them up. When a new
idea enters the mind of another, it enters a complex system with its
own structure of interests, biases, and assumptions. The learner does
not just absorb ideas whole. But precisely what is going on when
learning happens is difficult to describe, and so we must rely on other
metaphors.
There are a wide range of possibilities beyond the "Mind is a
container" metaphor that can open us up to new possibilities. For
example, Reddy suggests that we might think of the mind as a
toolmaker. When new ideas come to us that we think might be
122

The Art of Being Human
useful, we use the idea to make a tool. But because my experience,
interests, problems, and biases are different than yours, I make a
different tool.
This, like the "mind is a container" metaphor, strikes us as
partially true, though also incomplete. But by expanding our
metaphor vocabulary. we constantly open ourselves up to new
possibilities for how we think about the most important aspects of
our lives.
Consider some of those really big questions that are constantly on
our minds in the modern world: Who am I? What am I going to do? Am I
going to make it? All of them are propped up on unexamined dead
metaphors. Understanding what these metaphors are and how they
shape our thoughts and actions might help us find answers to these
questions, or perhaps lead us to new questions.
For example, when asking the question "Who am I?", we will
often say that we are trying to "find ourselves." This is a metaphor,
and it can shape your thoughts and actions. The attempt to find the
self assumes that there is a solid core self to be found. To find it, we
might try different career paths, bounce between relationships, or
travel from place to place looking for it. And each time we fail to find
it, we feel a little more "lost." The experiences seem wasted. But if we
change the metaphor and instead see our task as one of "creating
ourselves," those same experiences can be seen as part of the creative
process, each one becoming a part of who we are as we go about
creating the self. Of course, neither of these is precisely right. They
are both incomplete, but each fills in gaps the other missed. The
notion of creating yourself overlooks the fact that we are all
inherently different—that we all have different tendencies, capacities,
and limits; while the notion of finding yourself can overlook our
capacities to change and create new tendencies, develop new
capacities, and overcome limits.
And then there's the possibility that both of these metaphors put
too much emphasis on the self altogether, and perhaps we should be
considering a different metaphor. As the great poet Marshall Mathers
123

Michael Wesch
once noted, "You better lose yourself, in the moment, you own it, you
better never let it go." Of course, losing yourself may mean moving
beyond language altogether. This is what happened to neuroscientist
Jill Bolte Taylor during a stroke: the language center of her brain shut
down. She says, "I lost all definition of myself in relation to the
external world... Language is the constant reminder 'I am.'" And how
did she feel in this state? "I had joy. I just had joy," she told Radiolab
in an interview.
I found a peace inside of myself that I had not known before ... pure silence ... you
know that little voice that says, "Ah, man, the sun is shining"? Imagine you
don't hear that little voice ... you just experience the sun and the shining. ... It was
all of the present moment.
Though we are not likely to be willing to give up our language, we
can try to take control of it, and doing so requires that we recognize
that even simple verbs such as is or does are, in the words of Neil
Postman, "powerful metaphors that express some our most
fundamental conceptions of the way things are." We are hungry. The
Spanish "have hunger." This distinction is perhaps not very interesting
or meaningful until we put it into other domains. We might have the
flu but we do not have criminality. People do crimes and we have large
systems in place to find out exactly who did a crime and why. Of
course, these ideas can change. Not long ago one could be angry but
could not have anger. Now, new ideas about how anger works allow
people to recognize how anger can be seen as a treatable condition
for which people can receive much-needed help.
The key idea is that metaphors permeate our thoughts and deeply
shape how we make sense of the world. They do not necessarily
reflect the unchanging and absolute nature of reality. Metaphors are
the primary lens through which we make meaning of the world. As
long as our metaphors are dead and unexamined, they control us and
our thought patterns. When we examine the metaphors that guide us,
we gain the freedom to create new ones and become meaning-
124

The Art of Being Human
makers. As Neil Postman once famously noted, "word weavers are
world-makers."
WORD-WEAVERS ARE WORLD-MAKERS
Ellen Langer, professor of psychology at Harvard University, ran
a simple experiment in which she gave two groups of students an
object. One group was told, "This is a dog chew toy" while the other
group was told, "This might be a dog chew toy." Later, when an
eraser was needed, only the group that was told that the object
"might be" a dog chew toy thought that it might also be used as an
eraser.
The key difference is in how our minds pay attention to things
and ideas we consider pliable and conditional vs. those we consider
fixed and absolute. When we think of things and ideas as pliable and
conditional we play with them, and by playing with them, we become
more likely to find new, creative uses for them as well as remember
them later on.
If I knocked on your door and offered you $10,000 for a 3' x 7'
slab of wood, what would you do? Most people become frustrated
that they do not have a pile of wood nearby, but they are holding a 3'
x 7' slab of wood in their hand, the door itself! When we name
something ("door"), it tends to become fixed and absolute as that
thing in our mind, and disappears as all the other things it might
become. We fall into the trap of categories. As Nobel Prize-winning
physicist Niels Bohr says, "Our thoughts have us, rather than us
having them."
To pay attention to these alternatives and to be aware of the
pliable and conditional aspects of our world is to be mindful. The
power of mindfulness is wonderfully summarized by Ken Bain, who
notes that "all of us possess enormous power to change the world
and ourselves by shifting the language and categories we employ.
Maybe I'm thinking about this wrong. Is there a different way of seeing my
125

Michael Wesch
problem? Are there different words I might use? The brain becomes more
creative. Life becomes more exciting and fun."
This power to change the self by changing our words is welldocumented.
In one experiment, Langer and her team ran a short
seminar for maids at large hotels designed to inform them that their
jobs were good exercise. "Although actual behavior did not change,"
Langer reports, they "perceived themselves to be getting significantly
more exercise then before." Remarkably, their bodies actually
reflected this change. Over the next month they lost an average of
two pounds over the control group. They lost ½% body fat and their
blood pressure dropped 10 points.
Langer points out that such results are largely the result of the
placebo effect. And what is the placebo effect? It is the power of
your mind to actually change your body and heal itself. When you
change your beliefs in a way that is thoroughly convincing to your
mind, your brain chemistry actually changes. In fact, every drug in the
world is actually already present in the brain. That's why they work.
Our brain has receptors for them. "Every pharmacological agent or
drug that there is," Tor Wager told Radiolab's Jad Abumrod, "there is
a chemical produced by your brain that does that thing"
(http://www.radiolab.org/story/91539-placebo/). But the power to
change the self by changing your language does not stop with the
physical self. It runs deep into the very essence of how you
understand yourself as well.
FINDING YOUR "STRENGTHNESS"
Most of us have deep unconscious understandings of ourselves
that are not always flattering. We tend to push away these dark parts
of ourselves and rarely examine them. In doing so, we might also be
pushing away the parts of ourselves that make us who we are.
When we adopt a mindful approach to the world, we see
ourselves as pliable and conditional rather than fixed and absolute.
We can see our capacity for growth and change. This helps us see
126

The Art of Being Human
those darker parts of ourselves because we recognize that they might
not always be so dark. In fact, we might even see these dark aspects
of ourselves as the source of our greatest gifts.
When Gillian Lynne was a little girl, her teacher was often
frustrated with her. She would not sit still in the classroom,
constantly dancing around the room. The teacher asked her mother
to have her examined. After looking her over, the doctor turned on
the radio and left the room to retrieve her mother. The doctor
brought her mom to the door and asked her to look inside. Gillian
was being Gillian, dancing around the room to the music. "Your
daughter is not sick," the doctor said. "She's a dancer."
Gillian's mom promptly removed her from school and enrolled
her in dance school. She went on to be one of the greatest dancers
and choreographers of modern times, best known for her work in
Cats and Phantom of the Opera.
What appeared to be a weakness in one context (dancing around
the classroom) has become a great strength and widely celebrated in
another (dancing across the stage). In this way, our weaknesses may
in fact be strengths. Perhaps we are mistaken in separating them. As
word weavers making new meanings, perhaps a new word can help
us see parts of ourselves that otherwise remain hidden: strengthness.
A strengthness can be any apparent weakness that is a strength in
another context or generates strength over time. For example, one
former student struggled greatly with anxiety and panic attacks. Over
her years of struggle with this weakness, she developed a remarkable
capacity to calm herself in times of stress. Years later, when her
boyfriend was struggling with the stress of graduate school, she was
able to pass on some of her wisdom to help him calm himself. He
went on to finish his Ph.D. thanks to her remarkable abilities, and so
did she. Now a practicing Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, she has
helped hundreds of patients overcome the same debilitating anxiety
and panic attacks that once plagued her.
127

Michael Wesch
New words like "strengthness" can help us see ourselves and the
world in new ways. They shape how we see. We act based on what
we "see." As Neil Postman sums it up:
If we "see things" one way, we act accordingly. If we see them in another, we
act differently. The ability to learn turns out to be a function of the extent to which
one is capable of perception change. If a student goes through four years of school
and comes out "seeing" things in the way he did when he started, he will act the
same.
Which means he learned nothing.
LEARN MORE
A Man Without Words by Susan Schaller
My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, by
Jill Bolte Taylor
Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher
Metaphors We Live By
by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson
Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman
128

The Art of Being Human
Challenge Four: Word Weaving
Your challenge is to invent a word, phrase, or metaphor that you
think would make the world a better place and then try to spread it
among your friends.
Objective: See your own seeing by reflecting on the language and
metaphors you use and how you might choose different language or
metaphors to change the way you think and act. New perspectives
open up new questions, so this might also help you ask new
questions and make new connections to new ideas.
Step One: Invent a word, phrase, or new metaphor. Examples in this
lesson included "strengthness" and new metaphors about arguments,
education, and the self. What about love? Maybe we could use a
different word to describe our complex feelings. Or maybe we could
re-imagine metaphors like "falling in love." Anything goes.
Step Two: Introduce the word, phrase or metaphor in basic
conversation as if the word has always existed and see if your friends
catch on and start using it themselves.
Step Three: If they ask about it, give them a strong pitch as to why it
should exist.
Step Four: Show us or tell us about your adventure. Post a video or
share your story with #anth101challenge4
129

Michael Wesch
Lesson Five
Infrastructure
“We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”
130

The Art of Being Human
TOOLS AND THEIR HUMANS
In the late 1960s, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter was hired as
a communications consultant for what was then the Territory of
Papua and New Guinea. Colonial administrators were seeking advice
on how they might use radio, film, and television to reach, educate,
unite, and "rationalize" remote areas of the territory as they moved
toward independence. It gave Carpenter what he called "an
unparalleled opportunity to step in and out of 10,000 years of media
history." He recorded and created some of the most remarkable
events in local media history throughout the territory, such as the
first times people actually saw their own photographs in Polaroids.
When I arrived in New Guinea 35 years later, I stepped off a
plane onto a remote landing strip and walked one hour down a road
made for cars that no cars travel, that goes nowhere, built as part of a
government development project. It ends a few hundred meters from
Telefolip, what was once the sacred spiritual center of the Telefomin
people. I did not know that Edmund Carpenter had been there, but
upon my first glimpse of the village, I immediately recognized it from
a picture in Carpenter's book. The picture, taken 35 years ago,
131

Michael Wesch
features a movie camera sitting on a tripod in the center of the
village. A Telefol man leans over hesitantly as if trying to steal a peek
through the viewfinder. A young boy scurries out of the view of the
lens.
I reached out to Carpenter to find out more about his time in
Telefolip, and he generously sent me copies of over 30 hours of film
footage he took during his time in New Guinea. In one haunting
sequence, he snaps Polaroids of two men standing outside their
house and hands them the photos. Carpenter recounts that when he
first gave people pictured of themselves, they could not read them.
To them, the pictures were flat, static, and lifeless—meaningless. He
had to point to features on the images and features of their own
faces. Finally, "recognition gradually came *into the subject's face.
And fear."
132

The Art of Being Human
You can see it in the film footage. The man with the hat suddenly
seems self-conscious about the hat. He hesitantly takes it off,
hesitantly puts it back on, and finally just stands awkwardly with his
hat off, staring at the image and then back to the camera that took
the image.
The other man retreats to a house to be alone, staring at his
image for over 20 minutes.
133

Michael Wesch
Carpenter describes their reactions as the "terror of selfawareness,"
evidenced by "uncontrolled stomach trembling." He
describes the depths of the effect as one of "instant alienation,"
suggesting that it "created a new identity: the private individual." He
argued that the Polaroid and other recording media created a
situation in which, "for the first time, each man saw himself and his
environment clearly and he saw them as separable."
As an anthropologist, he understands that such a change is not
likely to come from just one small event, but it participated in a
whole host of other changes that were currently underway in New
Guinea, such as the arrival of schools and missions, and the
preparations to move toward national independence and selfgovernment.
Nonetheless, he could not shake the sense that these
media forms were having dramatic effects on their consciousness.
He describes one village where he handed out Polaroids with
great regret. He says that when he returned to the village months
later, he didn't recognize the place. "Houses had been rebuilt in a new
style. . . . They carried themselves differently. They acted differently. .
. . In one brutal movement they had been torn out of a tribal
existence and transformed into detached individuals, lonely,
frustrated, no longer at home— anywhere."
Such experiences left Carpenter disillusioned about the effects of
technology, especially communication technologies, on indigenous
peoples, and concerned about the effects of media everywhere. "I felt
like an environmentalist hired to discover more effective uses of
DDT," he lamented.
When I stepped into the village thirty-five years later, the oncethriving
spiritual center of Telefol life had been reduced to a ghostly
shell of what it once was. The once magnificent men's house had
recently collapsed. There were no plans to rebuild.
The other houses have all been abandoned. The residents have
moved into Western style pre-fab houses lined perfectly along that
government road that doesn't go anywhere. Powerlines power up
134

The Art of Being Human
radios, televisions, refrigerators, and lights. Traditional houses have
been made into "kitchens" reserved for cooking.
While powerlines had not yet reached the region of New Guinea
where I ultimately settled in to do my research, many of my friends
were eager for photographs of themselves and their families. I set up
a simple solar panel system that gave me about two hours of power
each day to write notes on my laptop, and a simple printer that I
could use to print pictures. I took a picture with my brothers along
with a middle-aged man, and then printed it to give to them. The
older man looked at the picture and excitedly pointed to my brothers,
naming them as he pointed. Then he pointed to the man in the
middle, himself, and said, "Who is that?" He saw himself so rarely that
he did not even recognize himself. I would see this happen over and
over again. It rarely happened with younger people, who often had
small mirrors they used for shaving or decorating their faces. But
many older villagers did not grow up with mirrors, and have never
sought to own one.
Contrast this with our own everyday practices. How many times
per day do we engage in the practice of objectifying the self into an
135

Michael Wesch
image? Or study the self in image form? How many glances into the
mirror? How many Snapchats? How many scrolls through the photo
gallery on our phones, Facebook, or Instagram? It's so often that we
need not even be looking at a mirror or image. Most of us have a
pretty good sense of how we look in our mind's eye. We adjust this
or that button, untuck our shirt just so, tuck our hair back behind our
ear, or adjust our hat ever so slightly as we imagine how others might
be seeing us at any given moment. We are constantly aware of
ourselves as objects that are constantly under the scrutiny and
judgment of others.
We take mirrors and photographs for granted, yet clearly they
have a profound effect on those who have never encountered them.
Is it possible that they also have a profound effect on us that has
since gone unnoticed? What if you gave up mirrors and all images for
a week, a month, or a year? Would your consciousness change?
Carpenter braved the possibility of career suicide to publish his
studies on these matters. He was severely criticized by some leading
anthropologists for his media experiments. He had anticipated the
criticism in the book itself, admitting, "It will immediately be asked if
anyone has the right to do this to another human being, no matter
what the reason."
His defense, although framed within the context of a generation
ago and half a world away, should still resound with us today. "If this
question is painful to answer when the situation is seen in
microcosm," he asked, how is it to be answered as millions of people
are allowing new media to permeate their lives, "the whole process
unexamined, undertaken blindly?"
His point is that we live a life completely immersed in
technologies. But do we really understand how they shape us? We
usually look at them as great comforts, wonderful conveniences,
important necessities, or the source of fantastic experiences. But how
do they change us? And how might we be different if we gave them
up or if these technologies never existed?
136

The Art of Being Human
"WE SHAPE OUR TOOLS,
AND THEN OUR TOOLS SHAPE US."
This quote from media scholar John Culkin is sometimes literally
true. Over long periods of time, the interaction between humans and
their tools can even reshape our DNA. Over the millions of years
that we have been using hand tools, there has been an evolutionary
advantage to having nimble and dexterous fingers. Over time, our
hands evolved an ability to manipulate objects with increasing
precision, allowing us to create more precise objects which in turn
create an ever- increasing advantage on more precise hand control.
Our hands and our hand-tools co-evolved in their complexity. Fire is
another example of a tool that changed our DNA. Fire allowed us to
cook our food so that we no longer had to spend hours of our day
chewing fibrous meats and tubers. Over time, we can see in the
skeletal record that our jaws have become weaker and less robust
since the invention of fire.
The power of technologies to literally shape our bodies is
beautifully demonstrated by this famous photo published by Phil
Hoffman in The American Journal of Orthopedic Surgery in 1905.
Shoes have not yet been around long enough to actually change
our DNA. If you go barefoot long enough, or from a young enough
age, you can also attain the amazing ability to spread your toes,
engage all of your nature-given talents for balance and agility, and
137

Michael Wesch
handle the roughest of surfaces without the aid of shoes. Similarly,
coats and sophisticated climate controls like air conditioning and
heating have reduced our ability to withstand cold and heat. Our
comforts make us weaker.
The idea that "we shape our tools and then our tools shape us" is
sometimes mistaken as a claim for technological determinism, the
idea that technology determines how we live, think, and act. But it
would be wrong to only point out how our tools shape us. As noted
in Lesson Two, cultures are complex and interrelated in such a way
that no one element completely determines the other elements of the
system. Instead, each element "shapes and is shaped by" another.
As we noted then, modern capitalism shapes and is shaped by
modern individualism. American individualism shapes and is shaped
by the American political system. The American labor market shapes
and is shaped by individualism. And so on. In other words, culture is
made up of a complex web of relationships of "mutual constitution"
and it is this idea that we point to with the phrase, "we shape our
tools and then our tools shape us."
138

The Art of Being Human
We can now use the "barrel model" introduced in Lesson 2 as a
guide to a profound set of questions about technologies and how
they might affect us. At the level of infrastructure, how does a new
technology shape our subsistence and economy? What other
technologies will it make more important or necessary? What
technologies might it displace and make obsolete?
When one technology requires or strongly influences the
adoption of another technology, we call it entanglement, and when
you follow the lines of entanglement far enough, you arrive at the
realization that a new technology can have far-reaching effects far
beyond what was originally intended.
Take the example of clothing. In the late 1970s, the first clothes
started to arrive in the New Guinea village through trade networks
with neighboring clans where they had government aid posts and
missions. Then, in the early 1980s, missionaries started bringing in
clothes and giving them to the locals. Many people immediately
converted to Christianity in hopes of receiving the luxurious goods,
and missionaries worried that they might be creating "clothes
Christians" – people whose faith was only worn on the skin and did
not penetrate to the soul.
Though the clothes offered comfort and protection from the
elements that the natives had never experienced before, they
presented a host of new problems. First, they had to be washed, so
they needed soap. They could not be dried effectively in their huts
due to the smoke and the thatch roofs infested with insects hungry
for cloth, so they needed new houses with tin rooftops. The tin
rooftops required nails to hold them in place. The nails required
hammers to nail them in. The tin was square and standardized, so
they needed some basic geometry and trigonometry to design their
new houses. Geometry and trigonometry required that they go to
school. School required paper, pens, and backpacks to carry it all.
And all of this required money. As it turns out, clothes are deeply
entangled with a vast range of other technologies that would
139

Michael Wesch
ultimately encourage remote New Guinea villagers to join the global
economy.
There are examples of entanglement all around us. For example,
if you take a walk starting from the center of my hometown of
Manhattan, Kansas, you will notice that the homes near the center of
town built prior to 1930 usually have large front porches and no
garages. If they do have a garage it is almost always separated from
the house and was built much later than the original house. The
reason for the absence of the garage is obvious. The garage is a
technology entangled with cars, of which there were very few prior to
1930. But what about the front porch? As we walk away from the
town center and enter the neighborhoods built after 1950, suddenly
the front porch is gone.
What happened? Air-conditioning. Large front porches allowed
people to stay cool in the summer, and had the pleasant side-effect of
creating "front porch culture" where people would sit and greet their
neighbors, creating strong social bonds. The air-conditioner
eliminated the need for these porches, and they disappeared, along
with that sense of community. Now the most prominent feature on
the front of most suburban homes is a large double-wide garage
door.
This example makes it clear that technological change is not
limited to technology. Technologies shape how we make a living
(infrastructure), how we connect, collaborate, and interact with one
another (social structure), and can even participate in a wide range of
cultural changes that lead to new core values and beliefs
(superstructure). To see how this can happen, let's take a brief look at
the last 12,000 years of human history.
140

The Art of Being Human
"THE WORLD UNTIL YESTERDAY"
Humans have been hunting and gathering their food for over two
million years. Viewed on that time-scale, it really is only yesterday that
we were still living without most of the technologies we take for
granted today. As Jared Diamond calls it, the world of hunters and
gatherers is best understood as "the world until yesterday." Up until
just 12,000 years ago, all humans everywhere lived basically the same
way. In the popular imagination we were hunters, and indeed we
were. But the evidence suggests that we acquired the vast majority of
our calories from foraging: gathering fruits, nuts, tubers, and other
foods.
Our simple manner of making a living had significant effects on
how we lived and what we lived for. Using simple tools such as
baskets and string bags for carrying the foods they find, and bows,
arrows, spears, and blowguns for hunting, a typical forager can
produce only enough food for themselves and a small family. So we
lived in small bands of no more than about one hundred people.
When an area was picked over, we needed to move to where the
picking was better. When a herd moved on, we needed to move with
them. So we lived with few possessions that might weigh us down.
This basic pattern of life was the foundation of all human life for
over two million years. There were a few key inventions that changed
human life over the course of these two million years; fire about
400,000 years ago, language about 200,000 years ago, and the
"Creative Explosion" about 50,000 years ago that brought about the
first clothing, fish nets, art, and more sophisticated stone blades. But
the foundation of our survival, the way we harnessed energy from the
Earth, remained foraging and hunting.
There are very few foraging cultures in existence today, but we
can learn something from the few that we do observe. Most
remarkable is their vast knowledge and awareness of the natural
world. Wade Davis tells of a Waorani hunter in the Ecuadorian
Amazon who could smell and identify the urine of an animal from up
141

Michael Wesch
to 40 paces away. Foragers manage to find food in even the most
extreme environments. The San Bushmen of the Kalahari desert in
southern Africa notice small things that you and I would not notice
in their desert landscape that allow them to track wild game for miles
or that tell them where to dig to retrieve roots and tubers. Some
tubers can be squeezed to retrieve water in a landscape otherwise
devoid of this basic human necessity. At the other extreme, Inuit of
the Arctic look for subtle signs on the barren white ice that indicate
where a seal might be coming up to breathe. They make a small hole
in the ice and wait, spearing the seal as it comes up for a breath. To
you and me, it looks like these people are pulling something out of
nothing.
Since their mode of subsistence can only support a small, sparse
population, the social structures of these societies are simple and
informal compared to the complex bureaucracies and government
systems of modern states. The average person in a remote band will
almost never encounter a stranger. Disputes can be settled without
the need for formal laws, lawyers or judges. Social order can be
maintained simply by the mutual desire to maintain good
relationships with one another and to support one another as needed.
With no need for formal social institutions, there are no formal
leaders, no offices to hold, no authority to lord over others.
There is no need for money or marketplaces. People simply
gather food and share it with others in a gift-based economy. In a
gift-based economy, you benefit by giving to others when you have
more than you need because you know they will give back when they
have more than they need. In this way, giving a gift provides
insurance against hard times. As such, people in gift economies place
a high value on their relationships, which can feed them when the
going gets rough, rather than material goods that are simply
burdensome to carry around and may mark you as wealthy and
burden you with requests for gifts from others.
This value on relationships extends to the natural and animal
world as well. Hunting cultures revere the animals they hunt. They
142

The Art of Being Human
are deeply thankful for them, and offer thanks to the animals they kill
for giving themselves to them. Their myths and rituals celebrate the
animals and often speak of a covenant made between the hunters and
their prey. For example, the Niitsipai of North America (often
referred to as the Blackfoot) tell the story of a young girl who offers
to marry a bison if the herd would just sacrifice themselves so her
people could survive. The bison agree to this and teach her their song
and dance of life, the famous "buffalo dance," which they perform so
the bison will continue to give themselves to the people in exchange
for renewed life through the dance.
In this way, the tools they use take a role in shaping all aspects of
their lives, from the way their societies are ordered and maintained, to
their core values, religious beliefs, rituals, and knowledge.
Though they lack the technologies and material goods that we
associate with wealth and affluence, Marshall Sahlins once described
them as "the original affluent society." Studies of their work habits
show that foragers only work to gather food for about 15 to 20 hours
per week, and this "work" includes hunting and berry-picking,
activities that we consider high-quality leisure activities. Indeed, most
of them do not distinguish between "work" and "leisure" at all. Their
affluence is not based on how much they have, but in how little they
need.
A popular story illustrates the point nicely. A rich businessman
retired to a fishing village in Mexico. Every morning, he went for a
walk and saw the same man packing up his fishing gear after a
morning of fishing. He asked the man what he was doing. "I caught
some fish to take home to my family. I'll take a siesta while they cook
this up, wake up to a nice dinner, and then pull out my guitar and
sing and dance into the night. Then I'll wake up and do it again."
"I'll tell you what," the businessman said. "I have been very
successful in my life, and I want to pass on all my knowledge to you.
Here's what you need to do. Fish all day, and have your wife sell the
surplus at the market. Save your money and buy a boat so you can
catch more fish. Save that surplus and buy a whole fleet of ships.
143

Michael Wesch
Eventually you can invest in a packaging and supply company and
make millions."
"That sounds good," the fisherman said. "Then what?"
"That's the best part. You sell your business and all of your
assets, buy yourself a nice little cottage on a beach in Mexico, go
fishing every morning, take siestas, wake up to a nice meal and then
pull out your guitar and sing and dance into the night."
THE LUXURY TRAP
Starting about 12,000 years ago, humans domesticated plants and
animals and started farming and raising livestock. Wheat, barley, pigs,
goats, sheep, and cattle were domesticated in the Middle East. Maize,
manioc, squash, gourds and llamas in the Americas. Taro in New
Guinea. Rice, beans, and pigs in China. All over the world,
simultaneously and independently, foragers shifted from their
nomadic way of life and settled into growing villages to cultivate
crops.
Given the apparently idyllic life of leisure, hunting, and gathering
berries, why did humans start farming, build massive cities, complex
technologies and burgeoning bureaucracies that ultimately sentence
our youth to 13 to 26 years of schooling just to understand how to
live and operate in this complex world?
Of course, the apparently idyllic life of foragers that provided
ample leisure time was also riddled with the dangers of infectious
disease, dangerous animals, deadly accidents, intertribal violence and
unpredictable weather patterns that could reduce food and water
supply. Infant mortality rates were high, and it was difficult to
provide adequate care for elders if they were lucky enough to live that
long.
But the life of an agricultural peasant a few thousand years later
was probably worse. We know that the turn toward agriculture
eventually led to the tremendous wealth of our current times, but
agriculture did not produce this wealth overnight. The first farmers
144

The Art of Being Human
would have faced the same dangers of infectious diseases, animals,
accidents, violence and weather of their foraging ancestors, but
instead of walking around picking berries and hunting, they made a
living by toiling in the fields under the brutal sun. They became
dependent on a diet with fewer foods and nutrients. So we're back to
the original question. Why did we do it?
The answer proposed by Yuvaal Hurari, author of the recent
best-seller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, is that humans fell
into what he calls "The Luxury Trap." One generation reasons that it
will make their life easier if they domesticate and plant a few seeds so
they can establish more permanent villages. Life is good and food is
plentiful for several generations. But as the carrying capacity rises, the
people have more children. After a few generations, what started out
as a luxury has become a necessity. Eventually the land can barely
support the burgeoning population, and people have to work harder
than ever to make a living.
Once humans started planting crops, the same piece of land that
could support a few dozen people could support a few hundred. And
once humans started irrigating that land and using animal-pulled
plows, that same piece of land could support a few thousand. As
Harari notes, the same area that could support about a hundred
"relatively healthy and well- nourished people" hunting and foraging
could now support "a large but cramped village of about 1,000
people, who suffered far more from disease and malnourishment."
It didn't matter that life was harder, less enjoyable, and more
precarious for the agricultural peasant than it was for the nomadic
forager. There was no going back. "The trap snapped shut," as Harari
says.
The broad sweep of changes that came along with the
domestication of plants and animals were so revolutionary that they
are often referred to as the Neolithic Revolution. Growing societies
required increasingly complex institutions to manage them.
Government, law, taxes, markets and bureaucracy were all formed in
the wake of the Neolithic Revolution. Over time, the clear trend was
145

Michael Wesch
toward greater production and wealth, a greater diversity of products
to consume with this wealth, and a greater diversity of jobs to
produce the goods, manage the wealth, and provide services to an
ever-growing population. But there were negative effects as well.
These farming societies were less efficient than our foraging
ancestors, burning far more energy per human. Social and economic
inequality rose, and we worked longer and harder than ever before.
For better or worse, human society and culture was forever changed.
The changes of the Neolithic Revolution set the stage for another
revolution nearly 12,000 years later: the Industrial Revolution. As
revolutionary as the domestication of plants and animals might have
been, most of what we take for granted today was still not in
existence just 250 years ago at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
At that time, over 90% of humans were working in agriculture.
Today, less than 40% of humans are farming, and the number is as
low as 2% in industrialized nations like America. The Industrial
Revolution ushered in an age in which more work would be done by
machines than by muscle. Before the Industrial Revolution there
were no cars, planes, phones, TVs, or radios. No suburbs, parking
lots, or drive-thrus. No Coke, Pepsi, or Starbucks. No grades or
compulsory schools. No Prozac, Zantac, or Zoloft. No Tweets,
Snaps, or Finstas. No texting or emojis.
But by far the most dramatic change that occurred in the wake of
the Industrial Revolution was what Harari calls "the most
momentous social revolution that ever befell humankind: the collapse
of the family and the local community and their replacement by the
state and the market." Prior to the Industrial Revolution, Harari
estimates that less than 10 percent of the products people commonly
used were purchased at the market. People were still mostly reliant on
their families and communities for food, shelter, education, and
employment. When they had trouble, they turned to their families. As
Harari summarizes, the family was "the welfare system, the health
system, the education system, the construction industry, the trade
146

The Art of Being Human
union, the pension fund, the insurance company, the radio, the
television, the newspapers, the bank and even the police."
New communication and transportation technologies enabled
markets and governments to provide these services in ways that
enticed people out of the security of their families and into the
marketplace as individuals. People became more mobile – physically,
socially, and morally. But, as Harari notes, "the liberation of the
individual comes at a cost." Our strong ties to family and community
started to wither, a trend that has continued to the present day.
We are enculturated to think of technological change as good, but
all of these technologies and changes have some negative side effects,
and many of them can be understood in terms of Harari's notion of
the luxury trap. For example, cars were invented to make it quicker
and easier to get from one place to another. In response, Americans
spread out into the countryside, creating suburbs, and now spend
nearly a full hour getting to and from work on average. In some
cities, the average is nearly two hours, more than eliminating the
supposed advantage of the car. Our communities transformed to
accommodate the car. By far the largest public spaces sponsored by
tax dollars are highways and parking lots. In order to accommodate
cars, our communities had to spread out into the familiar suburban
sprawl. In many suburbs, basic services and necessities are no longer
reachable on foot, and the car, which was once a luxury, has become
necessity. People rarely walk anywhere, reducing our physical health
while also making it less likely for us to know and interact with our
neighbors. That trap has snapped shut too.
But perhaps even more harrowing is to examine the cost of our
technologies on the environment. Since the Neolithic Revolution
there are now just 40,000 lions but over 600 million house cats.
There are 1.6 billion wild birds on the planet but over ten times as
many chickens. In total, humans and their domesticated pets and
livestock make up nearly 90% of all large animals on the planet. If
current trends continue, 75% of species will be extinct within the
next few centuries.
147

Michael Wesch
Humans also produce over 300 million metric tons of plastic
every year, some of which is drawn by ocean currents into the Great
Pacific garbage patch, an island of trash bigger than the state of
Texas.
Carbon dioxide levels continue to rise due in part to the burning
of fossil fuels, raising global temperatures and leading to more
extreme weather events. Sea levels have risen seven inches over the
past 100 years, and in the next 100 will rise high enough to threaten
major cities such as New York, Mumbai, and Shanghai.
Overall, our impact is so great that we will leave a lasting imprint
on the earth. The International Commission on Stratigraphy is
debating whether or not to formally declare that we have entered a
new epoch in the history of the earth, the Anthropocene.
We know that we simply cannot go on living as we do without
burning through our resources and disrupting climate patterns to a
point that the earth may not be hospitable to human life. For these
reasons, Jared Diamond once suggested that what appeared to be our
greatest technological triumph, the domestication of plants and
animals that set all of these forces in motion, might actually have
been our greatest mistake.
A POST-HUMAN FUTURE?
We now sit at the brink of what many think is yet another
revolution in human affairs. One harbinger of what might be to come
is the supercomputer Watson. Developed by IBM, in 2011 they set it
up to compete against the greatest Jeopardy players of all time. As the
74-time Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings fell further and further
behind, he conceded the match in the final round by writing on his
final answer, "I for one welcome our new computer overlords."
Computers are becoming more powerful every moment. They
drive cars, do taxes, trade stocks, manage complex budgets, play
chess, write music, and even write articles we read in newspapers and
online. They are even addressing problems and challenges that we
148

The Art of Being Human
struggle to comprehend. Scientists at Cornell University created a
computer program, Eureqa, which can analyze large data sets to find
patterns and create formulas that match the data. Eureqa has been
able to discover formulas that scientists could not, and sometimes
even finds a formula that works, but scientists don't understand why it
works.
The stock market is now dominated by computer algorithms,
with over 75% of all trades being made by computers. Computers
read headlines and make trades based on incoming news in
milliseconds, before a human even has time to finish reading the
headline.
As CGP Grey notes in his video, "Humans Need Not Apply,"
humans have spent years creating "mechanical muscles" (large
machines) to augment and replace manual labor. Now "mechanical
minds" are making human brain labor less in demand. Some robots
have already taken jobs. ATMs are so ubiquitous they have become
invisible, but they replaced many human bank tellers. Similarly, selfcheckout
machines at supermarkets are reducing the demand for
cashiers.
Uber already has self-driving cars picking up passengers in cities
around the United States. This may be disruptive to our culture in
ways that we cannot yet comprehend. Without labor costs, Uber may
be able to offer luxurious and convenient rides for anybody anywhere
for a cost so low that fewer people will decide to purchase a car. Just
as the Internet has started to provide meta-data and signals meant
only for robots, so our cities might soon be redesigned to
accommodate robot drivers. But even this is too limited a vision.
Self-driving cars are really part of an automated transportation and
delivery system that will be able to ship everything everywhere – by
land, air, and sea, a system which currently employs more people than
any other major economic sector in the United States. Within the
next ten years, the demand for labor in this sector could collapse.
Meanwhile, software algorithms are reducing the demand for tax
professionals, lawyers, journalists and many other fields. And Watson
149

Michael Wesch
is not only great at Jeopardy. Watson works in the medical field, and
some see it as the predecessor of a future “Dr. Bot” that will provide
sophisticated personal diagnoses.
Some bots are even producing creative works like art and music.
David Cope, a professor of music at UC Santa Cruz, has developed a
computer program that can analyze scores of music from a particular
composer and then create new music that sounds like it was written
by that composer. The music is good enough that it has fooled top
music critics and professionals into thinking it was produced by a
talented human.
In short, it appears that if you are not in the process of creating
an algorithm, you might be replaced by one. And of course, even
your job as a software engineer creating algorithms might not be safe.
Already, many engineers create learning algorithms that are designed
to write new algorithms on their own.
Some see this as the beginning of what is called "the Singularity."
The Singularity is a state of runaway technology growth, a point
beyond which human thought can no longer make sense of what is
happening. Futurists like Ray Kurzweil think this moment is coming
soon – within our lifetimes - and it will arrive when a machine is
created that is smart enough and capable enough to design and create
its own replacement. At that point, the replacement will design and
create its own replacement, and that replacement will create its
replacement, and so on, with each one better than the last, so that
within a very short period of time there will be a computer so
intelligent and capable that humans will be baffled by its power. We
will likely have no way of comprehending it other than in divine
terms. We will probably think of it as a god.
Kurzweil also predicts that as computers continue to become
smaller and faster at an exponential rate, we will soon have
molecular-sized nanobots operating in our bloodstreams to battle
disease. He believes that advancements such as these will allow
people alive today to live well into their 100s, and he predicts that by
150

The Art of Being Human
then we will have non-biological alternatives for living matter that
will replace our bodies and allow us to live forever.
He also predicts that nanobots and other technologies will
enhance our cognitive capacities and allow us to enter fully immersive
and realistic virtual realities. We will be able to act and move in these
worlds just as we do in the real world, but these worlds could be
populated by artificial intelligent beings, or other humans who have
entered the world with us – much like an MMORPG – but it will feel
entirely real. Noting that millions of ordinary people are already
spending more time in virtual worlds than they do in the real world,
Edward Castranova predicts that we may see a mass exodus to the
virtual world.
All these changes bring up fundamental questions about what it is
to be human. Kurzweil and his colleagues are transhumanist. They
are on a quest to enhance human capabilities and overcome disability,
disease, and death. It may sound crazy, but we are all transhumanist
in a sense. We all support and believe in the fight against cancer and
other diseases. We support and believe in treatments that allow
people with disabilities to live with them or overcome them. And we
do everything in our power to avoid death for ourselves and loved
ones, assuming our health is good. As science and technology
progress, will we eventually draw a line and say: beyond this, we let
people die? Beyond this, we let people suffer with their disability or
disease?
And what if we do overcome death? Will life still have the same
meaning? If you were going to live forever, would you be in school
right now? And what are you in school for, if all the jobs are done by
robots? It could create an existential crisis in which we lose our sense
of meaning and significance. Others think that this future may create
a literal existential crisis, in which hyper-smart and logical robots
realize that humans are a drain on the planet and reason that there is
no reason for our existence at all.
151

Michael Wesch
Perhaps we should be grateful for our limits. Our limits may
bring us pain, struggle, and suffering, but they also bring meaning to
our lives.
LEARN MORE
Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!
by Edmund Carpenter
The World Until Yesterday
by Jared Diamond
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
The Second Machine Age
by Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
152

The Art of Being Human
MEDIATED CULTURE
Four years after I first arrived in New Guinea, new media arrived
in the village. It wasn't cell phones, the Internet, or even television. It
was writing, which came in the form of census and law books,
sponsored by the state. Of the 2,000 people who lived in the region,
only 10 could read and write effectively, and they were the ones who
would try to carry out the state mandate to census the population and
bring them under the rule of law.
Doing a census sounds easy. All you have to do is list people's
names in a book. The problem with doing this in these remote
villages was that many people did not have formal names. They
already knew everybody they encountered and usually used a
relationship term to refer to them, like mother, father, sister, brother,
friend, trading partner, etc. Eventually they settled on creating
"census names" for which they adopted the English term "census
name" into their language.
As anthropologist Roger Rouse has pointed out, the emergence
of individualism as we know it today emerged from the micro-rituals
and routines of what he calls the "taxonomic state," such as
153

Michael Wesch
censusing and mapping, which allow the state to see its citizens. As
people in the village took on fixed, static names, they could start to
build more stable individual identities which might one day be
objectified in the form of an identity card such as a passport or
driver's license.
Inspired by the clean, straight lines of their books, the census
officials dreamed of eliminating the haphazardly built traditional
villages in favor of houses built along clean, straight lines, with each
house numbered to match the census book. The villages would have
the additional advantage of having high populations, making it easier
to govern the people from a central location while also increasing
their population numbers so that they would receive more funding
from the state. Their lives were quite literally being made over "by the
book."
At the same time as the census came in, so did the rule of law.
Until then, all disputes had been settled out in the open as affairs of
the local community. The goal was not to establish guilt but to heal
154

The Art of Being Human
the relationship. When law came to the village, individuals were taken
into the courthouse and measured against the letter of the law. The
court is not necessarily interested in healing relationships but in
determining motives, intentions, and guilt, all of which are intimately
tied into the logic of individualism.
Several people resisted these changes. They did not want to move
into new houses and villages. They liked how they lived and settled
disputes. So the government leaders held a meeting. First, it was
decided that the only people who could vote were those who could
read and write. Then, they voted on whether or not they could force
people to move into the new villages. The vote was unanimous, and
soon after that they began forcing people to move, sometimes by
burning down their houses.
The next two months were a dark time. Stress and tensions rose.
Witchcraft accusations ran rampant. Angry villagers on the brink of
losing their homes campaigned vociferously to preserve their homes
while those in favor of the government plan tried to sell their vision
of future prosperity.
155

Michael Wesch
But what was perhaps most remarkable about this sequence of
events was how it ended. As the bickering continued, the architects
of the movement looked around at the changes they had created and
did not like what they saw. They felt seduced by the counts in the
census book into thinking of their friends, kin and neighbors as
nothing more than numbers. They felt seduced by the clean lines of
their village plans into creating villages that looked clean and rational
but were not very functional. The doorways all faced the same way,
whereas traditionally they could position their doorway in such a way
as to be open to kin but private from passersby. They started to
recognize that there were important reasons why they had lived as
they lived, and they felt seduced by their new technologies into
imagining an alternative way of life that they ultimately found that
they did not want.
This is one of the great paradoxes of technology. It empowers
people in ways they have never been empowered before, and those
who master the technology seem to be the ones who benefit the
most. But technologies often have unintended consequences, and in
retrospect, it might be those who seem most empowered by the
technology who are in fact overpowered and seduced by the
technology itself.
I returned to the United States soon after these events in 2003.
Wikipedia had just launched. Facebook would launch the following
year, followed by YouTube, then Twitter, and the whole new
mediascape we now call "social media."
Thinking about how new media had affected my friends in New
Guinea, I wondered how these new media might affect us. How
might we be seduced by the technology to promote changes we do
not intend?
TELEVISION
When TV came into our homes over 50 years ago it immediately
transformed our relationships in a way that can actually be seen in the
156

The Art of Being Human
arrangement of the furniture. Everything had to be arranged to face
the box in the corner. For many people, this arrangement replaced
the dining room, so instead of family dinners spent around a table,
they were now spent around the box in the corner. And for 50 years,
the most important conversations of our culture happened inside that
box. They were controlled by the few (a few large TV networks) and
designed for the masses (to win over a large audience). So they were
always entertaining, even the serious ones. Our politics became
entertainment and spectacle, made to fit between commercial breaks.
In such ways, our media technologies shape our conversations, and
taken altogether our conversations create our culture which Neil
Postman grimly described in 1985 as one of irrelevance, incoherence,
and impotence.
Postman recounts that the Lincoln-Douglas political debates of
1858 unfolded over the course of seven hours, with each candidate
allowed an hour or more to respond in front of an attentive crowd. It
was a true debate. Now we have sound-bites. If you can't state your
argument in eight seconds or less, it's no good for TV. And in 1985
there was little you could do about it. Postman challenged his readers
to imagine sitting in front of a television watching the most serious
and "important" newscast available and ask yourself a series of
questions, "What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in
the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment?
... What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, or the CIA?" He
then says that he "shall take the liberty of answering for you: You
plan to do nothing." In 1985, we had few options, and that was
precisely Postman's point. There was no talking back to the media.
All media are biased, Postman noted. The form, structure, and
accessibility of a medium shapes and sometimes even dictates who
can say what, what can be said, how it can be said, who will hear it,
how it will be heard, and how those messages may or may not be
retrieved in the future. Postman coined the term "media ecology,"
noting that media become part of the environment all around us,
transforming how we relate to one another in all aspects, from art to
157

Michael Wesch
business, public politics to private family life. While any technology
can have an effect on society, the change brought about by a change
in media is especially profound, because a medium serves as the form
through which all aspects of culture are expressed, experienced, and
practiced.
A major new medium "changes the structure of discourse"
Postman notes, "by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by
favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by
demanding a certain kind of content."
Consider Postman's own narrative about how electronic media
remade American culture. In the mid-1800s, the telegraph brought
new forms of discourse to the nation. For the first time, information
could travel faster than a human being and was no longer spatially
constrained. The type of information was different, though, as the
telegraph did not allow for lengthy exposition. People increasingly
knew more of things, and less about them. Such news from distant
lands could not be acted upon, so its value wasn't tied to its use or
function, but to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. This created a
discourse of "irrelevance, incoherence, and impotence" that we still
recognize today on television. Postman pointed out that virtually all
aspects of American culture—economics, politics, religion, and even
education—had transformed into entertainment. We were, to borrow
the title of the book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death."
Postman was writing in 1985, at the dawn of cable television,
with its sudden onslaught of television options beyond traditional
networks. In a famous novel written that year, Don Delillo describes
a noxious cloud that may be seen to represent the mélange of
decontextualized and disembodied information that began
oversaturating our everyday experience, the phenomenon
anthropologist Thomas de Zengotita simply called, "the blob."
"What do people do in relation to the nameless, the odorless, the
ubiquitous?" asks DeLillo. "They go shopping, hunt pills ... " and
ultimately find themselves coming together in the long lines of the
superstore, "carts stocked with brightly colored goods ... the tabloids
158

The Art of Being Human
... the tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial ... the miracle
vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity ... the cults of
the famous and the dead."
Postman's notion of media ecology reminds us that media
become the environments in which we live. Humans are meaningseeking
and meaning-creating creatures, and the media we use
populate our environment of meanings. It is in this environment of
meanings that we search for our sense of self, identity, and
recognition. "Onslaught," a famous Dove TV commercial ,
demonstrates what this is like for a young girl immersed in our
current media environment. It shows a young girl bombarded by a
flurry of media messages telling her to be impossibly thin with
perfect skin, shining flowy hair, large breasts and buttocks, and more
than anything, that how she looks is her primary measure of value.
The commercial quickly progresses to a future in which the girl has
low self-esteem, false body-image, and an unending desire to "fix"
herself through the consumption of beauty products and plastic
surgery. The lyrics underscore the point, "Here it comes la breeze will
blow you away/all your reason and your sane sane little minds."
THE PROMISE OF THE INTERNET
The Onslaught video was made for the media environment of
1985 or 1995, but it was released in 2007. Large corporations no
longer had a monopoly on visual media. Rye Clifton posted a remix
of the commercial on YouTube called, "A message from Unilever."
He points out that Unilever is the parent company for both Dove
(the creator of this wonderful program rallying against the sins of the
beauty industry) and Axe (the creator of many of the more
objectifying and distasteful ads that are creating the problem in the
first place). Using imagery from Axe as the "breeze that will blow you
away," bombarding the young girl with objectifying imagery from
Unilever's own ad campaign, thereby reveals their hypocrisy.
159

Michael Wesch
Another, created by Greenpeace (2008), shows a young girl in
Indonesia taking in a flurry of images of the trees in the environment
around her being destroyed to clear the way for palm plantations
providing palm oil for Dove products. The song is the same, but with
parody lyrics, "There they go, your trees are gone today, all that
beauty hacked away. So use your minds." The video ends with the
young Indonesian girl walking away from a recently cut down forest,
and a subtitle that reads "98% of Indonesia's lowland forest will be
gone by the time Azizah is 25. Most is destroyed to make palm oil,
which is used in Dove products."
The video raced to over 1 million views on YouTube. Two weeks
later, Greenpeace activists were invited to the table with senior
executives at Unilever who then signed an immediate moratorium on
deforestation for palm oil in Southeast Asia (Greenpeace 2009).
Greenpeace noted that it was the single most effective tactic they had
ever used.
Recall Postman's challenge in 1985. "What are you going to do
about [major world issues you hear about on TV]… ?" He can no
longer take the liberty of answering for us. We are no longer
constrained to doing nothing. We can talk back. We can create.
While the mass media of television and major newspapers were
one-way, controlled by the few, and made for the masses, the
Internet offers a platform in which anyone can be a creator. It is not
controlled by the few, and content can be created for niche
audiences. More importantly, the Internet allowed us to experiment
with new forms of collaboration and conversation. Wikipedia allowed
anybody anywhere to contribute their knowledge to create the
world's largest encyclopedia, just as eBay allowed anybody anywhere
to sell to anybody anywhere else who had access to the Internet.
Blogs allowed anybody anywhere to launch their own content
platforms. YouTube allowed anybody anywhere to publish their own
video channels.
In late 2007, four Kenyans came together to create Ushahidi,
which means "witness" in Swahili. Ushahidi allowed people with
160

The Art of Being Human
ordinary cell phones to contribute important location-based
information in times of crisis. They invented it in the chaos of riots
that erupted after the Kenyan national elections. As traditional media
outlets were overwhelmed and inadequate, Ushahidi allowed 45,000
people who didn't even know each other to work together as citizen
reporters to provide key life-saving information. The creators of that
platform then gave it away for free online so that others could use it.
After the Haiti earthquake of 2010, some Tufts University students
implemented Ushahidi Haiti and started receiving thousands of
messages such as, "We are looking for Geby Joseph, who got buried
under Royal University." These messages were then mapped, not on
Google Maps – which was not good enough at the time – but on
Open Street Maps, an open platform that allowed volunteers all over
the world to trace satellite imagery to provide the most highlydetailed
maps available. A U.S. Marine also sent a note to Ushahidi
Haiti, to say, "I cannot overemphasize to you what the work of the
Ushahiti/Haiti has provided. It is saving lives every day. I wish I had
time to document to you every example, but there are too many...
The Marine Corps is using your project every second of the day to
get aid and assistance to the people that need it most."
Social media platforms have played key roles in major democratic
uprisings around the world. In Egypt, protestors used Facebook,
YouTube, and Twitter to inspire mass protests against President
Mubarak, who had used his power to silence dissent and stay in office
for over 30 years. After 18 days of mass demonstrations, Mubarak
stepped down.
But social media can also be used by dictators and terrorists. In
the wake of failed protests in Iran in 2009, the government posted
pictures of protestors and offered rewards for identifying them,
effectively using the Internet to extend their control and surveillance.
And for several years, ISIS has effectively used slick video campaigns,
radio shows, podcasts, and high-production-quality online magazines
to attract young people from all over the world to join their cause.
161

Michael Wesch
We are discovering that a media environment that allows
anybody anywhere to produce anything anytime and share whatever
they find with anyone creates major challenges for our culture. Longstanding
institutions such as major newspapers are closing. Essential
occupations such as journalism are dwindling as many journalism
majors now move into "content marketing" jobs, creating social
media content to promote brands and products.
Just as the mediascape dominated by television favored content
that was entertaining (even about serious topics), so does social
media. But we now live in an "attention economy" in which our lives
are so immersed in media that we simply don't have time to pay
attention to it all. In the battle for our attention, content creators
create shocking false headlines combined with surprising, shocking,
or near-pornographic imagery as "clickbait."
Meanwhile, platforms like YouTube and Facebook use
sophisticated algorithms to predict what we might like based on our
friends, previous likes, and shopping history. We end up only seeing
what Facebook thinks we will want to see, and end up living in what
Eli Pariser has called "filter bubbles."
The 2016 US presidential elections magnified these problems.
Democrats and Republicans lived in alternate media universes
throughout the campaign season. They did not share the same basic
facts about what was true and untrue, and both sides leveraged
attacks at the other for producing "fake news." And since anybody
anywhere can produce anything anytime, there was plenty of fake
news going around, some of which was produced by people outside
the United States with vested interests in the election outcome.
What can we do? There are online petitions to encourage
Facebook and Google to stop personalizing our content in such a
way that creates filter bubbles, and to create technologies that stop
the spread of fake news. But some scholars, such as Evgeny
Morozov, worry about such online petitions. Morozov worries that
true activism that involved real people organizing in the streets is
now being replaced by slacktivism, easy little "likes" and clicks done
162

The Art of Being Human
from the privacy of one's home that do not create lasting connections
with real people who share similar activist goals.
Thirty years ago, scholars like Neil Postman worried that the
major media corporations were using mass media to create a media
environment that created a culture of irrelevance, incoherence, and
impotence. Now, it seems that we might be doing it to ourselves.
THE INSTAGRAM EFFECT
Today, a new medium emerges every time someone creates a new
web application. A little Tinder here, a Twitter there, and a new way
of relating to others emerges, as well as new ways for contemplating
one's self in relation to others. Listing our interests, joining groups,
and playing games on Facebook; sharing photos and videos on
Instagram or Snapchat; swiping left or right on Tinder; sharing our
thoughts, ideas, and experiences on blogs; and following, being
followed, and tweeting on Twitter are not only ways of expressing
ourselves, they are new ways to reflect on who we are, offering new
kinds of social mirrors for understanding ourselves. And because
these technologies are changing so quickly, we are not unlike those
villagers seeing a photograph of themselves for the first time. We are
shocked into new forms of sudden self-awareness.
Unlike those villagers who barely know their own image, most
kids today have grown up with parents posting their
accomplishments on Facebook and then transitioned to having their
own accounts in high school. They know how to craft their best self
for the camera, and they're more comfortable than ever snapping
picture after picture of themselves, crafting beautiful pages full of
themselves and their likes and activities on Facebook and Instagram,
and sending out little snippets of their lives on Snapchat. The era of
the selfie is upon us.
I recently started noticing something strange about the profile
pictures my students were using on the online portal for my course.
They were all beautiful. When I face my students in person they look,
163

Michael Wesch
on the whole, like you would expect any large group of more or less
randomly selected college students to look. They look normal. On
the whole, they look average. But online, they are magnificent! The
women have flawless skin, bright white smiles, and beautiful hair.
The men look as if they were cut right out of an adventure magazine.
Upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that what I am seeing
is the filter.
Most of these pictures have been lifted from their social media
accounts, where one can find more of the filter. Blur effects filter out
skin blemishes. Color filters make the images look professional and
aesthetic. And of course, the only pictures that are posted are the
ones that make it past their own critical eye, which serves as yet
another filter. As a result, social media gives us a steady media stream
of beautiful people doing amazing things, and those people are our
friends.
And it isn't just young people. My Facebook feed is full of images
of smiling families sharing a night out, going to school, playing at
parks, and competing in their latest sporting events.
Television media gave us a steady stream of beautiful people
doing amazing things, and this could sometimes make us feel
inadequate or that our lives were not interesting or exciting. But we
could always comfort ourselves in knowing that the imagery was fake
and produced by a marketing machine.
But now every one of us is our own marketing machine,
producing a filtered reality for our friends to consume. Essena
O'Neill rose to Internet celebrity status on Instagram, and then
suddenly quit, going back to re-caption all of her old images to reveal
how they had been filtered. In one picture she sits on the beach,
showing off sculpted abs. "NOT REAL LIFE," she writes. "Would
have hardly eaten that day. Would have yelled at my little sister to
keep taking them until I was somewhat proud of this. Yep so totally
#goals." It can be inspiring to see your friends, or other people that
do not seem so different from you, looking amazing and doing
164

The Art of Being Human
amazing things. But as Essena O'Neill discovered, it can also feed
into a culture of feeling inadequate.
Sometimes the consequences are devastating. Madison Holleran,
a track athlete at Penn, seemed to have it all. Smart, beautiful, athletic
and at one of the top schools in the world, she seemed to have it
made. And her Instagram account showed it. We see her smiling as
she rides piggyback on a handsome boy. We see her proudly showing
off her new Penn track uniform. We see her smiling in front of a row
of beautiful houses, dressed in a beautiful dress. Indeed she seemed
to have it all. The last entry is a beautiful array of floating lights over
a park in the city. She took it just one hour before she took her own
life.
Writing about the event for ESPN, Kate Fagan noted that she
talked to her friends as they scrolled through Instagram, saying, "This
is what college is supposed to be like; this is what we want our life to
be like." Think of it as "the Instagram Effect" – the combined effects
of consuming the filtered reality of our friends.
We have a tendency to compare our insides to people's outsides.
Even before Instagram people were filtering their beliefs and
appearances to put on a good show, but social media has the
potential to magnify the effect. We see other people's lives through
sophisticated filters, each image, post, and tweet quantified in likes.
Seeing ourselves in a Polaroid is nothing new to us, but seeing
ourselves with such a clear quantification of our "like"-ability and
consuming a steady stream of filtered lives most definitely is.
"The constant seeking of likes and attention on social media
seems for many girls to feel like being a contestant in a never-ending
beauty pageant," reports Nancy Jo Sales in her book American Girls. A
recent study shows that there has been a spike in emotional problems
among 11- to 13-year-old girls since 2007, the year Apple's iPhone
ushered in era of the always-on mobile social networking world.
Since then, the "second world" of social media has become more
important than the real world for many teens, as the complexities of
teenage romance and the search for identity largely take place there.
165

Michael Wesch
A 2014 review of 19 studies found elevated levels of anxiety and
depression due to a "high expectation on girls in terms of appearance
and weight." Over half of American teenage girls are on unhealthy
diets. The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive
Surgery reported an increase in plastic surgeries among teens due to a
desire to look better on social media.
THE UNTHING EXPERIMENT
When Carpenter reported on the radical cultural changes that
were in part brought about by people seeing their images in a
Polaroid, he did so in hopes that we would analyze our own use of
technology as well.
To analyze the effects of my tools on me, I once tried to avoid all
visual images for a month. I stopped watching TV. I used an image
blocker on my web browser (Wizmage for Chrome) and configured
my phone to not load images. Of course, I couldn't avoid all images.
I still caught a glimpse of a billboard or product box now and then.
But I lived more or less without the supernormal stimuli of
photoshopped and surgically enhanced beautiful people living
apparently extraordinary lives beyond any life that I could ever
imagine for myself.
Within just a few days, I started to notice a difference. I found
ordinary people and ordinary life much more interesting, engaging,
and beautiful. Three weeks later, I was in an airport and felt a surge
of joie de vivre as I entered the mass of humanity. I was surrounded by
beautiful people doing extraordinary things. Every one of them
seemed to have an attractive quality and something interesting to say.
Just a month earlier, I would have entered that same mass of people
and seen nothing but overweight, unstylish, unkempt, and
unattractive people. But within a few weeks removed from the
onslaught of media, my consciousness had changed.
It struck me that media puts us in a state of passive consumption.
In media worlds, people and their lives exist for our enjoyment. They
166

The Art of Being Human
are objects and characters to like or dislike, rather than complex
people with complex histories and experiences to engage and interact
with. As I stopped seeing people as objects, I saw beauty and worth
in each of them. Without the distraction of media, I freed up several
hours of my day that I spent exercising, talking to friends, and being
out in the world.
LEARN MORE
Amusing Ourselves to Death
by Neil Postman
Here Comes Everybody
by Clay Shirky
The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, by
Evgeny Morozov
What Made Maddy Run
by Kate Fagan
167

Michael Wesch
168

The Art of Being Human
Challenge Five: The UnThing Experiment
Your challenge is to give something up and live without a key
technology for at least 48 hours.
Objective: Practice the art of seeing. See your seeing as you observe
how this technology might shape your assumptions. See big – how it
is an integral part of a larger cultural system. See small – how it
might shape our most mundane routines (or even our bodies). See it
all - how our lives and culture might be different (for better and for
worse) without it.
Step 1. Give something up, like shoes, chairs, or cars. Or try giving
up some form of virtual communication platform for at least 48
hours, and potentially a week or more.
Step 2. Post daily updates using #anth101challenge5, reflecting on
the following:
What do you miss about using the thing?
What have you gained by not using it?
How have you changed? Any insights? Do you see the world
or other people any differently?
Step 3. Continue the experiment until you have some significant
results. (Extend the time frame or move up a level if you do not have
any significant insights.)
Step 4. Use your insights to reflect on the key lesson: "We
create our tools and then our tools create us."
Learn more at anth101.com/challenge5
169

Michael Wesch
Lesson Six
Social Structure
Most of what we take as "reality" is a cultural construction – "realized"
through our unseen, unexamined assumptions of what is right,
true, or possible.
170

The Art of Being Human
LOVE IN FOUR CULTURES
Nimakot Village, Papua New Guinea
Late one morning, a large argument broke out in the central
clearing of the village. A young man and woman named Matius and
Rona sat looking dejected and ashamed near the center of the scuffle.
The two teenagers had been discovered sneaking off together the
previous night, and had been dragged into the clearing by their
families. Rona's brother sat next to her, armed with his 29-inch
machete, and looked menacingly at Matius. Matius averted his eyes
and stared down at the ground, picking at the grass with his fingers as
the chaos of the argument swirled around him. Rona's mother
stormed across the lawn, demanding that the boy's family give her a
large pig. Others from the girl's family nodded with approval and
encouraged her to continue. I sat with a group of locals about 20
meters away from the main action. One of the local women turned to
me with a tear in her eye as the argument escalated. Crying with tears
of joy, like a mother watching her own daughter on her wedding day,
she said, "This is just like when I got married!"
There are no formal ritual "weddings" in this part of New
Guinea, but events like this often mark the moment that a man and
171

Michael Wesch
woman announce their commitment to one another. By the end of
the vigorous discussion, the "bride price" had been set. Matius would
need to give the bride's family 95 items such as string bags, clothes,
and machetes. At a total market value of nearly $3,000 USD, the
request was many times the amount of wealth of any typical villager.
He would have to call upon his entire family for help, but even that
would not be enough. The challenge of building such a tremendous
amount of wealth would become an all-consuming and tremendously
stressful task for the next several years of his life. At stake was his
entire future – children, family, respect – even his most basic sense of
manhood.
Maasai Boarding School, Kenya
When Esther was 14, she learned that her father planned to give
her away in marriage to an older man. She ran away to her older
sister's house, who helped her enroll in a school far away. But her
father rushed the wedding plans, and her mother tracked her down
and removed her from the school. Still hoping that she could escape
the arranged marriage, she went to the District Officer, who told her
about a rescue center sponsored by an international aid team that
hopes to save young girls like Esther from early marriage and give her
a chance at school.
Her father came to the rescue center to retrieve Esther, but the
headmistress would not allow it, declaring Esther "a school child."
Her father disowned her on the spot. He replayed the scene to
anthropologist Caroline Archambault. "Esther will be your child," he
told the school. "You will give her a husband and she will never set
foot in my house again."
Madurai Village, Tamil Nadu, South India
For as long as Mayandi could remember, there was only one right
girl for him, his cousin. As the firstborn boy in a Kallar family of the
172

The Art of Being Human
Tamil, it was not only his right, but also "the right thing to do" to
marry his mother's brother's daughter. The girl was quite literally the
right girl for him, and they had a word for it, "murai."
Mayandi understood that it might seem cruel to an outsider
unfamiliar with their customs that someone should be forced to
marry someone. As he told American anthropologist Isabel Clark-
Decés about their customs, he joked that the "right" person is not
always "all right." Young Tamil girls would often tease each other
about the "right" boys they were destined to marry. Mayandi struck
the pose of a young girl talking to her girlfriend and joked, "Runny
Nose is here to see you!" or "Eggshell Eyes is at your door!"
But Mayandi, like many other young Tamil, came to love and
desire his "right" girl very much. It would bring status and honor to
the family to marry her. His in-laws would not be strangers and
would always feel welcomed in his house. He imagined a wonderful
life for himself, his bride-to-be, and their growing family.
But tragedy struck as they approached marriageable age. The
bride-to-be's father got involved in a deadly fight that sent him off to
prison, and she had to move into the city. Mayandi was desperate to
still make things work out and pressed his mother to arrange the
marriage, but it wasn't to be. She married another man two years
later.
Mayandi was devastated. He refused to marry for the next 20
years. Finally, after much pressure from his family, he relented and
married his sister's daughter. They now have two children.
Edinburgh, Scotland
Rabih is not worried about collecting money so that he can pay
for a bride. He is not worried about his sister being pulled out of
school and being forced to marry a man against her will, and he
would never dream of marrying his cousin. Rabih has his own set of
troubles as he pursues love and marriage.
173

Michael Wesch
Rabih is "in love," as they say in his culture. As he sits in his
room daydreaming about her, his mind wanders to fantasies of their
future together. He lets his mind run free and wonders whether or
not she might be "the One," his "soul mate" who will "complete
him." It is his highest ideal, and the thing he wants more than
anything in his life.
Feelings of passionate love are not unknown throughout the
world. Anthropologists have documented them in nearly every
culture they have studied, and have found evidence for romantic love
going back thousands of years. But there is something historically and
culturally unique about the feelings of people like Rabih. In the words
of philosopher Allain de Botton, who tells the story of Rabih in The
Course of Love, finding and falling in love "has been allowed to take on
the status of something close to the purpose of life," and this feeling
should be the foundation upon which a marriage should be built.
"True love" is everlasting, and thought to be the most important part
of a good marriage. If passion fades, it was not "true love."
This is precisely what worries Rabih. He has been in love before.
He has hurt and been hurt. How can he be sure that this is the one?
How can he make sure that their passion for one another will
continue to burn?
In this chapter, we'll explore love and marriage in four different
cultures. In order to understand their radically different ideas, ideals,
and practices, we will have to use our anthropological tools for seeing
our own seeing, seeing big, seeing small, and seeing it all. We'll have
to examine many different dimensions of culture – infrastructure,
social structure, and superstructure – to see how they all come to
bear on ideas and practices of love and marriage.
Culture, as we have seen in the preceding chapters, is a powerful
structure, but this structure is con-structed. The structure is nothing
but the total sum of all of our actions, habits, ideas, ideals, beliefs,
174

The Art of Being Human
values and practices, no matter how big or small. A cultural structure
is a powerful force in our lives. It provides the context and meaning
for our lives. But, at the same time, our collective actions make the
structure.
We make the structure.
The structure makes us.
This exploration will not only help us understand how different
cultural realities get "real-ized," but might also help us understand our
own realities in new ways. Such an exploration might even help speed
us along on our own journeys toward understanding those perplexing
questions about love that Rabih is trying to answer. As Alain de
Botton notes, it will ultimately be Rabih's ability to see past his
cultural conventions that will allow him to live up to his cultural
ideals. He suggests that Rabih will need
"...to recognize that the very things that he once considered romantic –
wordless intuitions, instantaneous longings, a trust in soul mates – are
what stand in the way of learning how to be with someone. He will
surmise that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling
opening ambitions, and that, for his relationships to work, he will need
to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place. He will
need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm."
A WORLD WITHOUT MONEY
Nimakot, Papua New Guinea
Matius had big plans for the day. He would be seeing one of his
trading partners from a distant village, and hoped that he could ask
him to support him in his quest to pay his bride price. It didn't
bother Matius that his trade partner would be part of a planned
attack on his village. In fact, he seemed excited by the prospect.
175

Michael Wesch
As word of the pending attack spread, all of the men from the
village, along with a few close friends and kin from other villages,
came in from their garden houses and hunting excursions, filling the
village with a sense of intense anticipation. Men performed chants
and dances in the village clearing, pumping themselves up for the
attack, while women peeked out through the cracks and darkened
doorways of village huts, anxiously awaiting what was to come.
We built a barricade of trees, limbs, and vines along the main
path, but we knew this would do little more than slow them down.
Around noon, we heard a twig snap just beyond our barrier, and
the village erupted into a frenzy of action. "Woop! Woop! Woop!" we
heard the attackers call out, as dozens of them crashed our barricade
and came rushing down the mountain into our village. Their faces
were painted red and their hands dripped with what looked like
blood, but they were not armed with spears or bows. They were
armed instead with sweet potatoes dripping with delicious and fatty
red marita sauce. They smashed the dripping tubers into our faces,
forcing us to eat, attacking us with kindness and generosity.
They left as quickly as they came, but the challenge was set. We
were to follow them back to their village and see if we could handle
all the food they had prepared for us. We had to navigate a series of
booby traps and sneak attacks of generosity along the way, sweet
potatoes and taro being thrown at us from the trees. When we finally
arrived at the edge of the village, their troops gathered for one last
intimidating chant. They circled in and yelled as loudly as they could
for as long as they could, letting the giant collective yell drown out in
a thumping rhythmic and barrel-chested "Woop! Woop! Woop!" We
responded in kind with our own chant, and then charged in for the
food.
As we entered the village, we found a giant pit filled with red
marita juice filled to the brim with hundreds of sweet potatoes and
taro. It was bigger than a kiddie pool, no less than six feet across and
nearly two feet deep. The marita seeds that had been washed to
create this pool littered every inch of ground throughout the entire
176

The Art of Being Human
village. It was no wonder that the attack had taken several days to
prepare.
We settled in for the feast with gusto, dozens of us taking our
turn at the pit. But an hour in we were starting to fade, and the
waterline of our pool of food seemed barely to budge. Our hosts
laughed in triumph and started boasting about how they had gathered
too much food for us to handle, giving credit to those among them
who cleaned it, processed it, thanking each contributor in turn, and
then proudly boasting again that their generosity was too much for
us. We left, defeated, but already taking stock of our own marita
produce and planning a return attack in the near future.
This is a world without money, banks, or complex insurance
policies. Their items of value (like marita and sweet potatoes) cannot
be stored indefinitely without spoiling. So large events like this serve
a similar function as our banks and insurance companies. When they
have a windfall of marita they give it away, knowing that when we
have a windfall of marita we will return the favor. Such events
strengthen social bonds and trade relationships, which are essential to
survival in tough times.
For decades, most economists built their models on rational
choice theory – the assumption that all humans are selfish and seek
to maximize their own material gain. But these beliefs and values may
be a reflection of our own socially constructed realities revolving
around money in a market economy, rather than human nature. In
these New Guinea villages, they struggle instead to demonstrate their
generosity and minimize their material gain. They are not trying to
accumulate wealth. Instead, they are trying to nurture relationships
through which wealth can flow. This does not mean they are not
rational, but when applied in New Guinea, rational choice theory has
to account for the different motives and values created within the
cultural context of different economic systems.
Anthropologists describe the difference between these economic
systems as gift economies and market economies. In both economies, the
177

Michael Wesch
same items might be exchanged and distributed, but in one they are
treated as gifts and in the other they are treated as commodities.
Take, for example, a bag of sweet potatoes. In a gift economy,
the bag of sweet potatoes is given with no immediate payment
expected or desired. Instead, the giver hopes to strengthen the
relationship between themselves and the recipient. The giver will
likely give a brief biography of the potatoes, who planted them,
tended them, harvested them, and so on, so that the recipient
understands their connection to several people who have all
contributed to the gift. In a commodity economy, that same bag
becomes a commodity. It has a price, something like $5, and the
recipient is expected to pay this price immediately. Once the price is
paid, the transaction is over.
There are strong practical reasons for gift economies and market
economies. Gift economies tend to thrive in small communities and
where most things of value have a short shelf-life. Wealth is not easily
stored, and there are no banks or currencies for them to store their
wealth in either. The best way to "store" wealth is to nurture strong
relationships. That way, when your own maritas are not ripe or your
garden is out of food, all of those people that you have given to in
the past will be there to give to you.
But beyond these practical reasons for the gift economy, are also
some profound implications for the core values, ideas, and ideals that
emerge in gift economies. In gift economies, people are constantly
engaged in relationship-building activities as they give and receive
gifts throughout the day. The constant reminders of where the gift
came from and all the hands that helped give them a profound sense
of interdependence. Along with this sense of interdependence comes
a value on relationships rather than things. Most "things" are quickly
consumed, rot, and fall apart. It is far more beneficial to have a
strong network of relationships than a big pile of slowly rotting sweet
potatoes.
It is only in this context that we can begin to understand the
practice of "bride price" in New Guinea, and why Matius must face
178

The Art of Being Human
this seemingly impossible task of gathering $3,000 worth of items in
exchange for his bride. From the Western perspective grounded in
the logic of a market economy, this looks like he is "buying" a wife.
But from the logic of a gift economy, he is building and
strengthening a vast network of social relationships that will soon
unite his network with the network of his bride.
The day turns out to be a great success for Matius. His trading
partner has agreed to support him. His gift will join with the gifts of
many others. And when Matius gives this bundle of gifts to his
bride's family, they will spread those gifts throughout their network.
By the logic of the gift economy, these people will give back, and a
large cycle of giving will be created that unites two large networks
that intersect at the new node created by the union of the bride and
groom.
MARRIAGE WITHOUT LOVE
Maasai Boarding School, Kenya
A similar gift logic operates among the Maasai as well. When
Esther's father arranged for her marriage at age 14, he was following
a customary system in which the parents of both the bride and
groom agree on the marriage terms for their children while they are
still young. The bride price is paid over the course of the entire
marriage. "There is probably no greater gift, as viewed by the Maasai,
then having been given a daughter," notes Dr. Achimbault. "Marriage
is understood and valued as an alliance of families."
Esther's father has three wives and 26 children. This practice of
having many wives, known as polygyny, is common among
pastoralists like the Maasai. This practice can be especially perplexing
to any Westerner who believes in "true love." In a recent BBC
program, a BBC reporter approached some Maasai teenage boys and
asks directly, "What does love mean to you?" The boys laugh shyly
and one of them rocks back and forth uncomfortably with a broad
179

Michael Wesch
smile on his face. "That's a real challenge!" one exclaims and asks his
friend to answer, who just giggles and turns away.
The reporter presses on the issue of polygyny. "When you do get
married, are you going to take more than one wife or just one?" she
asks. One boy answers matter-of-factly, "I will take one or two but
no more than two."
She is taken aback by the nonchalance of his answer. She
counters by joking with him, saying if he only takes one he can have
her, but she would never be involved in a polygynous marriage. The
man starts laughing. "But the work would be very hard for just one
wife," the young man explains. "You would have to look after the
cows, goats, water, and firewood – all on your own!"
Recent anthropological studies by Dr. Monique Borgerhoff
Mulder support the man's argument and show that polygynous
households among the Maasai have better access to food and
healthier children.
One of the Maasai women wants to show the reporter that
polygamy is actually good for them, and takes her to see the most
senior wife of a polygynous family. She lives in a beautiful brick
home, far superior to most of the other homes in the region. The
economic incentive for polygyny seems clear, but the reporter is still
skeptical about the quality of the marriage relationships. "Don't you
get jealous of the other wives?" the reporter asks.
"No, no. Never."
"Do you argue?"
"No ... we're friends. We never fight. We are all the same age. We
tell stories. We have fun."
Marriage practices like this are especially mystifying for people in
the West. For many Westerners, love is our biggest concern and our
strongest value, so when we find cultures that practice arranged
marriage or polygamy, we find it strange and immediately infer that
there may be a violation of basic human rights. But if we look at all
humans through all time, it is our ideas about love that are strange.
180

The Art of Being Human
Over 80 percent of all cultures worldwide practice polygyny (one
man married to more than one woman) and a handful of others
practice polyandry (one woman married to more than one man). As
hinted at by the response from the Maasai teen that the work of a
household would be very difficult for just one woman, the common
reasons given for why these forms of marriage often come down to
practicality. There is no mention of love.
Such marriages often make sense within the culture and
environment. For example, in Tibet, where arable land is scarce and
passed down through males, several brothers may marry one woman
in order to keep the land together. As anthropologist Melvyn
Goldstein has pointed out, if the land were divided among all sons in
each generation, it would only take a few generations for the land to
be too small to provide enough for the families.
Despite these apparent practical benefits, the value and
romanticism we place on love makes the idea of young girls like
Esther being married off at a young age unpalatable to most
Westerners. When Esther's father attempts to remove her from
school and arrange her marriage, he seems to be upholding
oppressive patriarchal values.
But Esther's father is practical and he wants what is best for his
children. He has sent most of his kids to school in hopes that they
can find new ways to make a living. However, school is far away and
expensive. Due to the dangers and difficulties of getting to school,
most girls enter school late, just as they are reaching reproductive age.
This creates a risk of early pregnancy, which will get them kicked out
of school and greatly limit their marriage prospects. Furthermore, the
schools have high drop-out rates and even those who finish are not
guaranteed a job.
Pastoralism – the traditional way of making a living – has become
more difficult due to frequent droughts brought about by climate
change. Land privatization poses an additional problem, since a
pastoralist is now constricted to the land to which he has a legal right.
In times of drought and scarcity, movement across vast land areas is
181

Michael Wesch
essential. One strategy for increasing the land one has access to is to
create alliances between lineages through strategically arranged
marriages. When Esther's father tried to pull her out of school, he did
so because he saw an opportunity for her to have a secure future as a
pastoralist with access to good land.
After laying out these essential pieces of context, Archambault
makes the case that we should be skeptical of simple "binaries" that
frame one side as "modern" and empowering of females and the
other as "traditional" and upholding the patriarchy. Such binaries are
common among NGOs promoting their plan to improve human
rights. But through the lens of anthropology, we can see our
assumptions, see the big picture, and see the details that allow us to
understand the cultural situation, empathize with the people
involved, and ultimately make more informed policy decisions.
LOVE WITHOUT MARRIAGE
Madurai Village, Tamil Nadu, South India
Sunil's marriage prospects looked good. In an arranged marriage
among the Tamil, families carefully consider the wealth, status,
reputation, and earning potential of potential marriage partners. Sunil
had it all, and he was on his way to earning a prestigious law degree.
But then he was struck by katal – an overwhelming sense of intense
and dumbfounded longing for another person that we might call
"love" in English. They say it is a "great feeling" that can "drive you
crazy" and compels you to "do things you would not ordinarily do."
It is a "permanent intoxication," as one 18-year old Tamil put it.
Love like this is known all over the world. Anthropologist Helen
Fisher looked at 166 cultures, and found evidence of passionate love
in 147 of them. As for the rest, she suspects that the ethnographers
just did not pay attention to it. The Tamil are no different. The
feeling of love may not be the foundation for their arranged
marriages, but that does not mean the Tamil do not feel love.
182

The Art of Being Human
Sunil described the girl as "smart, free, funny, and popular." He
met up with her every day after class, and soon he was, as he says,
"addicted" to her. Addiction might be the right word. Fisher studied
brain scans of people in love and found that the caudate nucleus and
ventral tegmental area of the brains lit up each time they were shown
an image of their lover. These are areas of the brain associated with
rewards, pleasure, and focused attention. Other studies have found
that falling in love floods our brain with chemicals associated with
the reward circuit, fueling two apparently opposite but mutually
sustaining emotions: passion and anxiety. Overall, the studies reveal a
chemical profile similar to someone with obsessive-compulsive
disorder.
When two people share these feelings together, they can
experience a shared euphoria like almost no other experience
available to humankind. But when only one person feels this
obsessive-compulsive form of passionate love – or when one person
stops feeling it while the other still feels it – it can unleash a
devastating psychological breakdown.
Sunil's romance was rocky. They started disagreeing and using
harsh words with one another. After a fight one night, Sunil worried
that she would leave him. His obsession gripped him with a flood of
anxiety. He tried calling her at 2 am, but she did not answer.
Desperate to talk to her, he went to her college early the next
morning in hopes of catching her before her first class. "She was so
happy to see me in the pathetic state I was in," Sunil lamented. When
she called later to break off the relationship, Sunil completely broke
down. He became an alcoholic and had to drop out of law school.
After two years of pain and trouble, he finally got over her,
stopped drinking, and finished law school. But by then he had already
missed out on his best opportunity for a successful arranged marriage
with his favorite cousin. The perfect match, someone he had thought
about marrying since the time he was a teenager, had come of age
while he was drinking away his sorrows and had already married
someone else (a different cousin).
183

Michael Wesch
Sunil's story represents an interesting tension at work as Tamil
society continues to change. A more urban and mobile society creates
more opportunities for young people to meet strangers and to feel
katal for them. Education and career opportunities take young people
far from home and family. The culture is starting to value
individualism, free choice, and autonomy – all of which come
together to make love marriages seem attractive. A common theme
of Indian movies and television shows is the tension between love
and arranged marriages.
However, most Tamil do not elope and create love marriages.
From the standpoint of the family, the reasons are clear. As
anthropologist Clark-Decés points out, "The basic explanation for
this is that marriage is too important to be left to chance individual
attraction – in fact, a child's marriage is the most important and often
the most expensive decision a South Asian family ever has to make."
Worldwide, arranged marriages are especially common when a
significant transfer of wealth is at stake, such as a large inheritance,
bride price, or dowry. In India, marriage usually entails very large gifts
between the families, often the equivalent of three years of salary or
more. When the wealth of an entire extended family is on the line,
everybody in the extended family has a vested interest in the union
and arranged marriages are the norm and ideal.
It is not surprising then that the parents of bride and groom
would prefer an arranged marriage. However, Clark- Decés and other
anthropologists note that arranged marriage remains the norm and
ideal among youth as well. Young men like Sunil want to achieve
success and respectability within the ideals and values of their culture.
They view marriage as the union of two families, not just two people.
And ultimately, "for them, an arranged marriage is a sign of parental
love."
This preference for arranged marriages has a profound impact on
how people grow up. As Clark-Decés points out, the social category
of "bachelor" is non-existent. Tamil youth do not spend a great deal
of time in their teens and twenties worrying about who to date or
184

The Art of Being Human
how to date, since that is rarely the road toward marriage. Instead,
they focus primarily on attaining significant status markers that
confer wealth and prestige, such as their education. Whereas college
in the United States is often seen as a place to meet a potential mate,
college in South India is a place where one earns a degree to elevate
their status for an arranged marriage.
It is not that love is absent or impossible in arranged marriages,
but it is not the primary basis upon which marriages are formed. In a
recent survey, 76% of Indians said they would marry someone if they
had the right qualities, even if they were not in love. Only 14% of
Americans would do so. As Leena Abraham found in a study of
college students in Mumbai, love marriages are "seen as an
arrangement beset with enormous insecurity."
ORIGINS OF LOVE MARRIAGE
Love marriage was once uncommon in the West as well. It was
not until the Industrial Revolution and the broad cultural changes
that came with it that love marriage became the norm. With the
Industrial Revolution, individuals were no longer tied to land held in
the family name. They became more mobile and less dependent on
family and community for survival. People started orienting their
lives more toward the market, and they could use the state for a
safety net, weakening their dependency on relationships and family.
This increased individualism had two competing effects. On the
one hand, it gave people more freedom. They became accustomed to
making individual choices every moment of the day. But this freedom
came with a cost. As they had more and more choices about what to
buy, what to do, and how to act, they were also increasingly troubled
with the question of whether or not they were choosing the right
thing to buy, the right thing to do, or the right way to act. They came
to suffer from a sense of what Emile Durkheim called anomie, a
condition in which society provides little guidance and leaves people
feeling lost and disconnected.
185

Michael Wesch
Feeling empowered by the power to choose, yet feeling lost and
disconnected, romantic love marriage emerged as the perfect
solution. We go searching for "the One" who can make us "feel
whole" and "completes us." This is the key to understanding just how
different we are from those Massai teens. They live in small, closeknit
communities full of tight bonds to family and friends. Large,
close-knit families are still the ideal in India as well. They do not need
more intimacy. They have enough of it already. We, on the other
hand, often feel alone, lost, and insecure. We crave intimacy. We
crave a sense of validation. And we find that through love.
Unfortunately, this sets up an impossible situation. With the
breakdown of family and community, we often turn to our lovers for
intimacy, friendship, and economic support. One person is expected
to provide all of this and passion at the same time. "We now ask our
lovers for the emotional connection and sense of belonging that my
grandmother could get from a whole village," notes family therapist
Sue Johnson. But the security necessary for the intimacy and
friendship we crave along with the everyday trials and mundanity of
running a household can kill passion.
THE PARADOXES OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE
Edinburgh, Scotland
"For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons:
because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing
grain business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle
to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation
of a holy text … what has replaced it – the marriage of feeling …
What matters is that two people wish desperately that it happen, are
drawn to another by an overwhelming instinct, and know in their hearts
that it is right."
- Allain de Botton
186

The Art of Being Human
In his book The Course of Love, philosopher Allain de Botton tells
the love story of Rabih and Kirsten, along with his cutting
observations about love and marriage. After a whirlwind romance,
Rabih proposes to her, hoping to capture the feelings he and Kirsten
have for each other and preserve them forever. Unfortunately, you
cannot freeze a feeling, or marry one. You have to marry a person
with whom you once shared a feeling. And feelings are not
necessarily forever.
In A Natural History of Love, anthropologist Helen Fisher
identifies two kinds of love: the burning fire of romantic passionate
love, and the enduring intimacy and calm of companionate love.
These two loves have very different chemical profiles in the brain.
Romantic love is a rush of dopamine, a drop in serotonin, and a rise
in cortisol that creates an intense passion and desire. Companionate
love activates the attachment circuits of the brain. It is oxytocin-rich
and induces a loving calm and sense of security. Unfortunately, this
sense of calm and security can actually work against our feelings of
passion. Passion thrives on insecurity. The reason for our obsessive
ruminations and fluttering hearts is in part the very frightening idea
that we might lose this person or that they might not return our love.
The more we try to freeze the feeling by "locking in" the relationship
through promises, proposals, or other means of entanglement, the
more we drive it away. A desire for connection requires a sense of
separation. The more we fuse our lives together, the less passionate
we become.
This is not a problem in many cultures where passion in marriage
is not required or expected. But in the West, there is a strong sense
that "true love" burns with passion forever. If passion fades, it isn't
"true love."
So as Rabih and Kirsten squabble in Ikea over which drinking
glasses to purchase for their apartment, there is a lot more at stake
than mere aesthetics. This will be one of thousands of little squabbles
that are unavoidable when merging two lives, but they will always
reflect deeper concerns and misgivings each one has about the other
187

Michael Wesch
person. Such squabbles will be the main forum where they will try to
shape and shift one another, make adaptations and compromises in
who they are, and assess the quality of their relationship.
These negotiations are fraught with tension because of another
ideal of "true love"—that it is unconditional, and that if someone
truly loves you they will unequivocally accept you for all that you are
and never try to change you. Each little push or prod feels like a
rejection of the self.
Behind these feelings are deep and profound cultural
assumptions about love itself. We tend to focus on love as a feeling.
But according to a landmark book by psychologist Erich Fromm, our
focus should not be on "being loved" so much as it should be on the
act of loving and building up one's capacity to love. This insight runs
counter to the cultural ideal of "true love" which says that when we
find the right person, love will come easily and without effort. As a
result of our misunderstandings about love, Fromm argues, "there is
hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such
tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly,
as love."
This basic insight is easy to accept intellectually, but it is quite
another thing to incorporate it into your everyday life. For Rabih and
Kirsten, it is the arrival of their first child that helps them understand
love as something to give rather than something to merely feel and
expect to be given. The helpless and demanding baby gives them
ample practice in selfless love of another without any expectation of
return.
Unfortunately for Rabih and Kirsten, their ability to love their
child does not translate into an act of loving for one another. In the
midst of sleepless nights, diaper changes, and domestic duties, there
is little love left to give after caring for the baby. Over the coming
years, Rabih and Kirsten admire each other greatly for the patience
and care shown for their children, but also feel pangs of remorse and
jealousy that such love and kindness had become so rare between
them.
188

The Art of Being Human
One would think that after so many years of marriage, people
would stop needing a sense of validation from the other. But, de
Botton notes, "we are never through with the requirement for
acceptance. This isn't a curse limited to the inadequate and the weak."
So long as we continue to care about the other person, we are
unlikely to be able to free ourselves from concerns about how they
feel about us.
Unfortunately, Rabih and Kirsten need very different things to
feel a sense of validation. Rabih wants to rekindle the passionate love
they once shared in sexual union. But after a long day of giving her
body and self to her children, Kirsten does not want to be touched.
She needs time to herself, and Rabih's "romantic" proposals feel like
just another thing to put on her long "to do" list for others.
Allain de Botton's Story of Love recounts many twists and turns
in the love story of Rabih and Kirsten. It is an honest portrayal of a
true love story in which seemingly mundane arguments about who
does more housework take their rightful place alongside more
dramatic affairs and bouts of jealousy. Though they often feel
distance between them, they go through everything – raising kids,
watching their own parents grow old and die – together.
It is only after all of this – 13 years after saying their vows – that
Rabih finally feels "ready for marriage." He is ready not because he is
finally secure in an unequivocal faith in a perfect love with his soul
mate for whom he feels an unbounding and never-ending sense of
passion, but because he has given up on the idea that love should
come easily. He is committed to the art of loving, not just a desire to be
loved, and looks forward to all that his life, his wife, and his children
might teach him along the way.
189

Michael Wesch
LEARN MORE
“Ethnographic Empathy and the Social Context of Rights:
‘Rescuing’ Maasai Girls from Early marriage” by Caroline S.
Archambault. American Anthropologist 113(4):632-643.
The Right Spouse: Preferential Marriages in Tamil Nadu, by
Isabelle Clark- Decés
The Course of Love: A Novel
by Alain de Botton
190

The Art of Being Human
BECOMING OUR SELVES
Daniel has no eyes. Born with an aggressive eye cancer, they were
removed before his first birthday. From an early age, Daniel realized
that he could sense what objects are around him and where they are
by clicking and listening for the echoes. Ever since then, like a bat, he
uses echolocation to find his way around the world. It has allowed
him to run around his neighborhood freely, climb trees, hike alone
into the wilderness, and generally get around well as someone with
perfect vision. "I can honestly say that I do not feel blind," he says.
In fact, he never thought of himself as "blind" until he met
another boy named Adam at his elementary school. By then, Daniel
was already riding bikes, packing his own lunch, and walking to
school by himself. Adam, in contrast, had always attended a special
school for the blind and had a constant supply of helpers to escort
him through the world and guide him through his daily routines.
Daniel was frustrated with Adam's helplessness. He couldn't
understand why Adam couldn't do things for himself or join in games
on the playground. Even worse, the other kids started to mix Daniel
191

Michael Wesch
and Adam up. They were "the blind boys." For the first time, Daniel
felt what it was like to have society define him as "blind." And he was
shocked and frustrated to discover that society did not expect any
more from him than they did from Adam.
He had trouble making sense of it until he found a book by
sociologist Robert Scott called The Making of Blind Men. In that book,
Scott suggests that blindness is socially constructed. From the first
powerful paragraph onward, Scott argues that "the various attitudes
and patterns of behavior that characterize people who are blind are
not inherent in the condition but, rather, are acquired through
ordinary process of social learning."
To most people, this sounds shocking and farfetched. How can
blindness be "socially constructed"? Blindness seems to be a matterof-fact
physical reality, especially in the case of Daniel, who has no
eyes. But Scott doesn't mean to question this physical reality. Instead,
he wants to challenge the assumptions that create a social role for
blind people as "docile, dependent, melancholy, and helpless."
Throughout his research, he meets many people like Daniel who defy
these expectations, but finds others who have been conditioned to fit
the stereotype. "Blind men are made," Scott declares emphatically,
"by the same process of socialization that have made us all."
Scott moves the discussion beyond blindness to point out that we
are all "made." Our self-concept is our estimation of how others see
us given our culture's core beliefs, expectations, and values. This selfconcept
in turn shapes how we perceive the world and engage with it.
In other words, most of what we take as "reality" is socially
constructed, "real-ized" through our unseen, unexamined
assumptions about what is right, true, or possible.
Scott reveals three processes through which our realities – such
as "blindness" – are real-ized.
1. Beliefs and expectations: The first is the process of
enculturation through which we learn the basic
"common sense" beliefs and values of our culture.
192

The Art of Being Human
From an early age, people learn a set of stereotypical
expectations and beliefs about blind people as "docile,
dependent, melancholy, and helpless." Blind people
take on these beliefs and expectations as part of their
self-concept.
2. Behaviors and interactions: Second, these beliefs
become guidelines for our behaviors and interactions
with others. In this way, even if a blind person has the
fortitude to reject the stereotypes of blindness put upon
them, they might be denied opportunities for more
independence by the expectations of others who do not
allow the blind person to take on a job or do other
things for themselves.
3. Structures and institutions: Third, these beliefs and
behaviors are woven into larger institutions and other
social structures through which the beliefs and
behaviors are reinforced. Institutionalized norms, laws,
behaviors, and services shape our beliefs about what is
right, true, and possible.
Scott found that blind people were encouraged to attend special
schools and follow specific job tracks designed to accommodate their
disabilities. They were offered free rides, escorted by hand through
their daily activities, and had many of their daily tasks done for them.
While these are all well-intentioned services, Scott also noticed that
they reinforced the message that "blind people can't do these things."
When Scott did the original research for his book in the 1960s, nearly
2/3 of blind American students were not participating in gym class.
He worried that by treating blind people as helpless, they were
becoming more helpless.
Many studies support this concern. Even rats seem to change
their behavior based on what people think of them. In a remarkably
193

Michael Wesch
clever experiment, psychologist Bob Rosenthal lied to his research
assistants and told them that one group of rats was "smart" and
another group "dumb." They were, in fact, the same kind of rats with
no differences between them, yet the "smart" rats performed twice as
well on the experimental tests as the "dumb" rats. Careful analysis
found that the expectations of the experimenters subtly changed the
way they behaved toward the rats, and those subtle behaviors made a
big difference.
Other studies have found that teacher's expectations of students
can raise or lower IQ scores and a study of military trainers found
that their expectations can affect how fast a soldier can run. As
psychologist Carol Dweck explains, we convey our expectations
through very subtle cues, such as how far we stand apart and how
much eye contact we make. These subtle behaviors make a difference
in how people perform.
While we all understand the power of our own belief on our own
behavior, these studies demonstrate that other people's beliefs can
also affect us. This link between belief and behavior can become a
vicious circle. A teacher's low expectations make a student perform
poorly. The poor performance justifies and re-enforces the low
expectations, so the student continues to perform poorly, and so on.
Daniel Kish was raised by a mother who refused to let society's
expectations of blindness become Daniel's destiny. She let him roam
free and challenged him to find his own way to make his way in the
world. As a result, Daniel's mastery of echolocation allowed him to
"see" and distinguish trees, park benches, and poles. He now enjoys
hiking in the woods, bike rides, and walking around town without any
assistance or seeing aids.
These abilities are reflected in his brain. Brain scans show that
Daniel's visual cortex lights up as he uses echolocation. His mind is
actually creating visual imagery from the information he receives
through echolocation, so despite not having any eyes, he can see.
Recent studies suggest that he actually sees with the same visual acuity
as an ordinary person sees in their peripheral vision. In other words,
194

The Art of Being Human
he may not be able to read the words in a book, but he knows the
book is there.
The story of Daniel Kish is a fitting opening for this lesson,
because it reveals how a trio of forces – beliefs, behaviors, and
structures – can shape how we see the world and ourselves. From an
early age we are immersed in beliefs, behaviors and structures that tell
us how to be a man or a woman, what it means to be "white,"
"black," or "Asian," and what qualifies as "handsome," "beautiful," or
"sexy" among many other ideals and values that will form the
backdrop against which we will form our sense of who we are.
GENDER: BIOLOGY OR CULTURE?
In the toy section of a store, you are likely to find an aisle of soft
"girly" colors like pink and purple populated with dolls and
playhouses. The next aisle has colder colors and sharper edges with
guns and cars. Before they can put together a full sentence, most
children will know which toys are for boys and which are for girls.
Do these different interests of boys and girls reflect innate biological
differences, or is the socialization of boys and girls so powerful that it
already starts to appear at a very young age?
An issue of Ladies Home Journal in 1918 assigned blue to girls and
pink to boys. It wasn't until the 1940s that American culture settled
into the now familiar and taken-for-granted idea that pink is for girls
and blue is for boys. But while the color of the toys is obviously a
cultural construction, the boy's affinity for cars and trucks and the
girl's affinity for dolls continues to be the subject of wide-spread
debate in neuroscience, biology, psychology, and the social sciences.
In 1911, Thorndike suggested that the reason boys like trucks and
girls like dolls is that men are more interested in "things and their
mechanisms" and women are more interested in "persons and their
feelings." Though highly controversial, a meta-study by Su, Rounds,
and Armstrong in 2009 that analyzed dozens of studies on the topic
found that men and women across multiple cultures see themselves
195

Michael Wesch
differently, as "Women reported themselves to be higher in
Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Warmth, and Openness to Feelings,
whereas men were higher in Assertiveness and Openness to Ideas."
The differences were modest but statistically significant, and they
seemed to confirm gender stereotypes. Other studies reveal similar
results. Though there is no total scientific consensus, there is a strong
contingent of scientists concluding that there are small but significant
differences between men and women in their personality traits and
interests. Conforming to the expectations of gender stereotypes, on
average, women are slightly better than men when it comes to verbal
reasoning, feeling, and empathy, while men on average are slightly
better at systems thinking and spatial visualization. On average,
women are more agreeable while men are more aggressive and
assertive. The largest difference is that on average, women are more
interested in people while men are more interested in things.
These differences are subtle, and there is a lot of overlap between
men and women. If you were to pick a man or woman at random
and try to guess if they would be above average in any of these traits,
you would only improve your odds very little if you went with the
stereotype. But even a small difference can matter a great deal when
looking at what roles and careers people choose to pursue; indeed, a
small difference in an average can make a big difference at the
extremes. These subtle differences might potentially explain why
women are so vastly under-represented in STEM fields but make up
the majority of nurses and clinical psychologists (due to an interest in
people vs. things). They might also explain why women are less wellrepresented
in leadership positions (due, potentially, to men being
more aggressive and less agreeable).
Are these differences real and permanent? Are they biological or
cultural? The stakes of this debate are high. If these gender
differences are real, innate, and unchangeable, then there may be little
reason to suspect wide-spread discrimination and bias as the reason
behind gender inequality. It might instead be a product of gendered
choices and inclinations. Proponents of this position argue that we
196

The Art of Being Human
already have equal opportunity laws in place and a culture that
promotes and champions the freedom to pursue your dreams. They
suggest that perhaps the gender gap and apparent inequality is just a
product of individual choices.
There are high stakes for men as well. Gender stereotypes that
propose that men are more violent, courageous, and strong-willed,
along with gender roles that ask men to provide for the family, serve
the country, and sacrifice themselves for others while showing no
signs of emotion or weakness, lead to many negative outcomes for
men. While it is easy to look at the fact that 80% of all political
leadership positions and 93% of the Fortune 500 CEOs are men and
think that men have all the privilege, we should also consider the
effect of gender stereotypes on the vast majority of men. Men's
Rights Activists point out that men make up 97% of combat
fatalities. They do more dangerous work, making up 93% of all work
fatalities. Because they are stereotyped to be less nurturing, they lose
custody in 84% of divorces. They also struggle more in school,
making up just 43% of college enrollments. The problems start early,
as they are nearly twice as likely as girls to repeat kindergarten.
With such high stakes, a constant flurry of articles, blog posts,
YouTube videos, and message boards create a highly contentious and
polarized cultural space where the origin and value of stereotypes is
vehemently argued.
Contrary to what we would expect if these differences were
biological and innate, they differ in magnitude across cultures.
However, contrary to what we might expect if the differences were
cultural, they are more pronounced in cultures where sex roles are
more egalitarian and minimized, such as in European and American
cultures. In Northern Europe, where gender equality is highest,
gender differences in career choice are the most pronounced.
Proponents of the biological thesis suggest that this is definitive
proof that these differences are innate and not socially constructed.
But there are many critics of these studies. They point out a
number of flaws in the studies that replicate gender stereotypes while
197

Michael Wesch
offering little evidence that the stereotypes are actually true. For
example, many of the most-cited studies ask participants to selfreport
on their level of empathy or respond hypothetically to
prompts such as "I really enjoy caring for people" or "When I read
the newspaper, I am drawn to tables of information, such as football
league scores or stock market indices." Critics have found that in
research situations in which people are reminded of their gender and
gender stereotypes, the differences are magnified, but in situations
where their gender is minimized the differences go away. A careful
review of these studies by scholars like Cordelia Fine have found
these self-report studies are unreliable in predicting actual behavior or
actual ability, and the content of the questions themselves signal
gender stereotypes (men like football and stock markets) that reveal
little about how men and women actually think and more about how
they have been culturally conditioned.
In short, the studies that attempt to suggest that gender
differences are entirely rooted in biology continually come up short,
but that is not to say there are not real biological differences. As
biologists Anne Fausto-Sterling has summarized the situation, the
brain "remains a vast unknown, a perfect medium on which to
project, even unwittingly, assumptions about gender." But despite
these unwitting assumptions, the cutting-edge research in psychology
and neuroscience have demonstrated that there are real sex
differences in the brain that should not be overlooked. Ongoing
research is focusing less on whether gender is strictly biological or
strictly cultural, and instead how biology and culture intersect in the
creation of gender, trying to understand gender as a biocultural
creation.
ARE GENDER STEREOTYPES UNIVERSAL?
Gender roles and stereotypes are pervasive in all cultures, and
while there is some variation, there is also considerable overlap. All
over the world and across almost all cultures, men hold more
198

The Art of Being Human
positions of leadership in economic, political, and religious domains,
while women are most often the primary caregivers. Throughout
much of human history, women would have been the primary source
of sustenance for growing babies through breast feeding, leaving it to
the man to do more work outside the home to bring home food.
Men tend to be associated with public activities, while women are
more associated with domestic activities. These differences usually
also entail differences in status and power, so that globally we see
pervasive inequality between men and women.
In Nimakot, Papua New Guinea, traditional religious beliefs
practiced until the 1980s were centered around the great ancestress
Afek. Temples throughout the region marked key places where she
literally "gave birth" to the key elements of the culture. Women's
reproductive powers were highly revered and feared. Menstrual blood
was seen as dangerous and polluting. During their periods, women
were required to stay in a small menstrual hut away from the main
village, and women were never allowed into the men's house, where
the most sacred rituals surrounding the ancestress took place. So
while it may appear that women are given a lofty status in light of the
culture revolving around an ancestress, in practice women were
locked out of positions of sacred and political power, and forced into
confinement for three days of every month.
There are a wide range of approaches and opinions on these
matters, even within the same culture or religion. Some Muslim
women, for example, see the wearing of the hijab head-covering as
oppressive, refuse to wear it, and encourage other women to give it
up as well. But other Muslim women argue that it is their right and
choice to wear the hijab as an expression of their submission to God,
and that it gives them the freedom to move about in public without
the leering and objectifying eyes of men. Some of these same Muslim
women argue that it is the scantily-clad Instagram model obsessed
with her looks, morphing her body through diets, postures, and
surgery, who is truly overcome and controlled by the gaze of men.
199

Michael Wesch
There is also considerable cultural variation in the total number
of genders. The socialization of "men" and "women" starts at a very
young age. By the time we are making the wish-list for our fifth
birthday, we already take it for granted that there are two distinct
categories of children: boys and girls. But a quick review of gender
roles and categories around the world demonstrates that many of our
ideas about gender are socially constructed and can exist in very
different ways in different cultures.
It is commonly assumed that one is just born male or female, and
while it is true that there are important biological differences formed
at birth and ongoing differences that emerge throughout life, these
are not easily put into a simple binary of male and female.
To understand this complexity, anthropologists find it useful to
distinguish between sex and gender. Sex refers to an individual's
biological traits while gender refers to cultural categories, roles,
values, and identities. In short, sex is biological. Gender is cultural.
In India there is a third gender called the Hijra. Hijra are people
who were usually born male but live their lives as a third gender,
neither male nor female. Some are born intersexed, having both male
and female reproductive organs. Texts dating back 4,000 years
describe how Hijra were thought to bring luck and fertility. Several
Native American cultures have also traditionally recognized a third
gender and sometimes ascribed special curing powers to them. The
Bugis on the island of Sulawesi recognize five genders. What we call
"transgendered men" or "transgendered women" have a ready and
identifiable role and place in their society. To these they add a fifth,
the Bissu. Bissu are androgynous shamans. They are not merely
thought to be gender neutral or non-binary. A better translation is
that they are "gender transcendent." They are thought to have special
connections to the hidden world of "batin." The Bugis believe that all
five genders must live in harmony.
These more complex systems that move beyond the simple
binary of male and female may be better suited for the realities of
human variation. Over 70 million people worldwide are born
200

The Art of Being Human
intersexed. They have chromosomes, reproductive organs, or
genitalia that are not exclusively male or female. In societies where
such variations are not accepted, these individuals are often put
through painful gender assignment surgeries that can cause
psychological troubles later on if their inner identity fails to match
with the identity others ascribe to them based on their biology.
"MAKING GENDER"
To understand how gender might be socially constructed, we can
remove the references to blindness from the example in the opening
story and create a sort of "Mad Libs" for the social real-ization of
gender. You could fill in the blanks below with the expectations
associated with either gender to create a short summary of how that
gender is socially constructed.
1. Beliefs and expectations: From an early age, people
learn a set of stereotypical expectations and beliefs
about men/women as "__________." Men/women
take on these beliefs and expectations as part of their
self-concept.
2. Behaviors and interactions: Second, these beliefs
become guidelines for our behaviors and interactions
with others. In this way, even if a man/woman has the
fortitude to reject the stereotypes put upon them, they
might be denied opportunities for ____________ by
the expectations of others who do not allow the
men/women to ________.
3. Structures and institutions: Third, these beliefs and
behaviors are woven into larger institutions and other
social structures through which the beliefs and
behaviors are reinforced. Institutionalized norms, laws,
behaviors, and services shape our beliefs about what is
right, true, and possible.
201

Michael Wesch
Together, these three concepts make up a trio of real-ization,
with each element relating to and re-enforcing the others. You could
draw the relations between them like this:
In a landmark set of essays called "Making Gender,"
anthropologist Sherri Ortner explores the relationships between these
domains as a way of exploring how gender roles, stereotypes, and
relationships might change or get reproduced in our everyday actions.
She notes that this involves "looking at and listening to real people
doing real things ... and trying to figure out how what they are doing
or have done will or will not reconfigure the world they live in." For
her, the anthropological project consists of understanding the cultural
constraints of the world, as well as the ways in which people actively
live among such constraints, sometimes recreating those same
constraints, but sometimes changing them.
Consider the first element: beliefs and expectations. Cordelia Fine
asks you to imagine that you are part of a study in which the
researcher has asked you to write down what males and females are
like according to cultural lore. You might resist the idea that people
can be stereotyped, but you would have no trouble reproducing the
stereotype. "One list would probably feature communal personality
traits like compassionate, loves children, dependent, interpersonally
sensitive, nurturing ... On the other character inventory we would see
agentic descriptions like leader, aggressive, ambitious, analytical,
competitive, dominant, independent, and individualistic." She
202

The Art of Being Human
concludes by noting that you would have no trouble knowing which
one matches which gender.
Unfortunately, even if you don't buy into these stereotypes, you
can't help but take them into account in forming your own selfconcept.
They are part of the cultural framework and meaning system
upon which we craft our identity and sense of self. Even if we
explicitly choose to craft an identity against these stereotypes, we do
so in full acknowledgment that we are doing so, and that we may
need to be prepared for how the world might receive us. A woman
who demonstrates an aggressive leadership style will likely be
perceived more negatively than a man with the same approach, while
a stay-at-home dad who shows emotion easily may be openly
ridiculed for not properly providing for his family. In short, we do
not craft our identities in a social vacuum and must account for
cultural stereotypes as we navigate the world.
In this way, beliefs and expectations shape the second element;
behaviors and interactions. We have probably all experienced
ourselves bending our personalities ever so slightly to accommodate a
particular situation. If we are around people we think might hold
stronger traditional gender stereotypes, we are likely to change our
behavior to match their expectations. Controlled studies by Stacy
Sinclair in which women are told that they are about to meet with a
charming but sexist man led these women to self-assess themselves as
more stereotypically feminine.
Other studies prime students with gender stereotypes and then
give them moral dilemmas to see how they will respond. For
example, in a study by psychologist Michelle Ryan, one group of
participants was asked to brainstorm ideas for debating gender
stereotypes and another was not. Then they were asked to solve a
moral dilemma. Among those who had brainstormed the ideas for
debating gender stereotypes, women were twice as likely to respond
to the moral dilemma by offering empathy and care-based solutions
in line with gender stereotypes.
203

Michael Wesch
In other words, whenever the gender stereotype is in mind,
people shape their behavior in relation to that stereotype. It is
surprisingly easy to bring the stereotype to mind. When researchers at
American University added a small checkbox to indicate your gender
as male or female to the top of a self-assessment, women started
rating their verbal abilities higher and math abilities lower than when
the checkbox was not on the form.
Psychologists who study "stereotype threat" call this "priming." It
is a technique used in the lab to "prime" research participants with a
gender stereotype, role, or identity before doing another task to see
how it effects the outcome. But these effects go far beyond the lab,
because while the "priming" done in the lab is often very subtle, we
live our lives completely immersed in situations that can prime these
gender stereotypes. As evidence of this, consider the constant barrage
of advertisements we see online, on TV, and in our social media
feeds that reproduce gender stereotypes and consider their effect.
When researcher Paul Davies showed research participants
advertisements of women in beauty commercials or doting over a
brownie mix and then asked them to take an exam, he found that
women attempted far fewer math problems than they did if they were
shown more neutral ads. They also were less likely to aspire to careers
in STEM fields after seeing these commercials. Psychologists Jennifer
Steele and Nalini Ambady conclude that "our culture creates a
situation of repeated priming of stereotypes and their related
identities, which eventually help to define a person's long-term
attitude towards specific domains."
As a result of the stereotypes and behaviors they influence, we
end up creating the third element: structures and institutions. Women
who resist the stereotype and pursue STEM fields, attempt to climb
corporate ladders, or pursue political success will find fewer and
fewer other women alongside them as they move up the ranks. They
find themselves in male-dominated institutions that reinforce and
reproduce the stereotypes. Despite the progress made over the past
50 years, they may still face discrimination in hiring and promotion,
204

The Art of Being Human
or they may find that their ideas or opinions are not often accepted,
or they may find themselves immersed in a masculine culture where
they find it difficult to fit in and be effective.
Meanwhile, in Armenia, women make up about half of computer
science majors (vs. 15% in America). Hasmik Gharibyan suggests
that this is because Armenians do not expect to have a job they love.
Jobs are for financial stability. Joy is to be found in family and
friends, not a job. We see a similar pattern in other developing
countries, so that contrary to many expectations, those countries with
more traditional views of gender have less gender inequality.
As mentioned earlier, many of those who favor a biological
explanation take this as evidence that men and women have innately
different interests and abilities leading them down different career
paths when they have total freedom of movement. However,
sociologists Maria Charles and Karen Bradley argue that these
differences result from our strong cultural emphasis on individual
self-expression. Unlike developing countries, self-expression plays a
large role in career choice over practical considerations. Being an
anthropology major or an engineering major is as much an identity as
it is a career.
In this way, a culture that values self-expression may exaggerate
and exacerbate the stereotypes and frameworks that provide the raw
material from which people construct their selves. While the impact
of stereotypes may seem small in any particular situation, we are
never not in a situation, and these effects add up and result in
substantially different and gendered behavioral patterns, interests,
and worldviews. These behaviors, interests, and worldviews then
become a part of the social world that others must navigate, thereby
perpetuating the stereotypes.
We do not know yet how this social construction interacts with
biological processes in the brain, but as anthropologists, sociologists,
psychologists, biologists, and neuroscientists continue their
explorations into how gender is made, we will likely see many
205

Michael Wesch
important new discoveries in the field demonstrating the complexities
of this biocultural creation.
RACE AS A BIOCULTURAL CONSTRUCTION
Most Americans publicly proclaim that they are not racist, but all
Americans know the common stereotypes and how they map on to
each racial category. The idea that there are "blacks" "whites" and
"Asians" goes largely unquestioned. But many anthropologists
propose that when we look at the entire global human population,
the notion of race is a myth. It is a cultural construction. As
biological anthropologist Alan Goodman notes, "what's black in the
United States is not what's black in Brazil or what's black in South
Africa. What was black in 1940 is different from what is black in
2000." Scientists like Goodman note that if you lined up all the
people on the planet in terms of skin color you would see a slow
gradation from light skin to dark skin and at no point could you
realistically declare the point at which you transition from "black
people" to "white people."
How did our skins get their color? Skin color is an adaptation to
sun exposure. Populations in very sunny areas along the equator have
evolved to produce more melanin, which darkens the skin and
protects them from skin disorders as well as neural tube defects that
can kill unborn children. Populations in less sunny areas have evolved
with less melanin so that their lighter skins can absorb more Vitamin
D, which aids in the absorption of calcium, building stronger bones.
When anthropologists argue that race is a myth, they are pointing
out that variations in skin color cannot be neatly categorized with
other traits so that people can be clearly separated into clear types
(races) along the lines created by our cultural concept of race. For
example, some populations in the world that have dark skin have
curly hair, while others have straight hair. Some are very tall, and
some are very short. Humans have a tendency to create categories
206

The Art of Being Human
based on visual traits like skin color because they're so prominently
visible. But, as anthropologist Marvin Harris notes, organizing people
into racial types according to skin color makes as much sense as
trying to organize them according to whether or not they can roll
their tongues. Skin color, like tongue-rolling, is highly unlikely to
correlate with any complex behavior such as intelligence, discipline,
aggression, or personality, in part because these complex behaviors
are strongly shaped by culture and therefore the racial categories and
stereotypes in any given culture will have a profound effect on those
behaviors.
This is not to say there is not significant human variation across
populations, but cutting-edge DNA studies from revolutionary
studies in genetics have shown that the boundaries of what might be
considered "populations" have always been changing. As geneticist
David Reich points out, there were different populations in the past,
but "the fault lines across populations were almost unrecognizably
different from today." So while different populations differ in bodily
dimensions, lactose tolerance, disease resistance, and the ability to
breath at high altitudes, these differences do not fall into neat, fixed,
unchanging, and scientifically verifiable racial categories.
Currently, most anthropologists maintain that race is a social
construction with no basis in biology. However, some
anthropologists are now arguing that our social constructions are
having a real impact on biology. For example, if someone is socially
classified as "black," they are more likely to live in conditions with
limited access to good nutrition and healthcare. In short, as Nancy
Krieger recently noted, "racism harms health," and this means that
different races have different biology, but this biology is in part
shaped by social forces.
At the root of these health inequalities is continued racial
segregation. Why, 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, are our
cities still segregated? Why do white families have over 10 times the
net worth of black families? Why are whites almost twice as likely to
own a home? Why are blacks twice as likely to be unemployed? Why
207

Michael Wesch
are black babies 2.5 times more likely to die before their first
birthday?
Race is real-ized through the same triad of forces that real-ize
gender and blind men in the previous examples.
At the level of beliefs, studies show that Americans hold implicit
biases even when they claim to deny all racial biases. For example,
Yarka Mekawi and Konrad Bresin at the University of Illinois
recently did a meta-analysis of the many studies involving the
"shooter task" in which people are asked to shoot at video images of
men with guns but avoid shooting men who are not holding guns.
They found that across 42 studies, people were found to shoot armed
black men faster than armed white men, and slower to decide to not
shoot unarmed blacks. Such studies are increasingly important in an
age of social media that has brought several police shootings of
unarmed blacks under public scrutiny and inspired widespread
protests such as the Black Lives Matter movement. These studies
reveal that the stereotype that blacks are prone to anger and violence
lays a claim on the consciousness of whites and blacks, even when
those individuals are committed to overcoming racial bias.
Our beliefs, conscious and unconscious, affect our behavior.
When researchers sent out identical resumes with only the names
changed, they found that resumes with "white-sounding" names like
Greg and Emily were 50% more likely to receive a call-back versus
resumes with "black-sounding" names like Jamal and Lakisha.
These biases are often shared across races, so that blacks and
whites hold the same stereotypes, and these stereotypes affect how
they act and perform. For example, Jeff Stone at the University of
Arizona set up a mini-golf course and announced to the players that
it was specially designed to measure raw athletic ability. Black players
outperformed white players. Then, without changing the course at all,
he announced that the course was specially designed to measure one's
ability to see and interpret spatial geometry. White players
outperformed black players.
208

The Art of Being Human
But we fail to see how the ideas become real-ized without also
looking at structure and the impact of institutionalized racism.
Institutionalized racism is often misunderstood as institutions and
laws that are overtly racist, or as an institution that is permeated with
racists people or racist ideology. These misunderstandings lead
people to claim that a city and its institutions cannot be described as
having institutionalized racism if the city or its institutions are
operated by blacks.
Institutionalized racism is better viewed not as the willful creation
of racists or racist institutions, but as the cumulative effect of
policies, systems and processes that may not have been designed with
racism in mind, but which have the effect of disadvantaging certain
racial groups.
For example, consider the insurance industry. Insurance
companies do not usually have racist policies or overt racists working
within them. In fact, when they are found to have any racist policies
or racist employees, they face legal sanctioning. Nonetheless, they do
have a set of policies that disadvantage blacks disproportionately to
whites. They charge for auto-insurance based on ZIP code, which
includes a calculation for how likely it is that your car might be stolen
or damaged. Since more blacks live in poor, high-crime areas, this
policy has the effect of disadvantaging them.
In many states and cities, school funding is also tied to ZIP code.
It is also much more difficult to get a loan in some ZIP codes.
Therefore, one of the most powerful forces that continuously recreates
racial prejudices is a structure that includes black poverty and
segregated cities created after hundreds of years of slavery and official
segregation. Even though official segregation is now a thing of the
past, its legacy lives on as black families are more likely to live in
poverty and in impoverished neighborhoods where it is more difficult
to find and receive loans, a good education, and good opportunities.
On average, blacks continue to have less wealth, less education, fewer
opportunities, and live in impoverished areas with higher crime rates.
These characteristics then get associated with blackness, thereby
209

Michael Wesch
supporting the stereotypes that inform the practices that continually
re-create the structure of segregation.
As Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton argued when
coining the term "institutional racism," we all rightly protest and take
action when someone dies as the victim of a racist hate crime, but fail
to see the problem when
"...five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of power,
food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed
and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of
conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community ..."
That was written over 50 years ago, in 1967. Black poverty in the
inner city remains a problem, exacerbated by many historical trends
and forces. Recognizing the triad of forces involved in real-ization
(beliefs, behaviors, and structures) is essential to overcoming racim.
If we only try to rid ourselves of our biased beliefs, we run the risk of
not addressing important practices and structures that perpetuate
those beliefs.
This potential to raise awareness, liberate our thinking, see our
seeing, and potentially build a better world is why social scientists
have been so excited about the idea of the social construction of
reality for the past fifty years. But given that the future of reality is at
stake, such discussions can become highly politicized and
contentious, especially when the discussions might impact public
policy or social norms.
This kind of investigation allows us to see into the processes
through which our culture is made, and may even give us an
opportunity to push back and re-make culture. But how far can this
go? Can we really see the makings of our own realities and then just
re-make them? This is not something to be answered in a single
book, but to be continually discussed and debated in our everyday
lives. Indeed, such a debate is the engine of culture and cultural
210

The Art of Being Human
change itself. However, we can make three important points of
departure:
1. Socially constructed realities shape and are shaped by
physical reality in many complex ways.
2. Because the future of reality is at stake, discussion and
debate about socially constructed realities tend to be
highly politically charged and contentious.
3. Socially constructed realities are "made up" but they are
still "real" and have real consequences. "Time" and
"money" may be social constructions, but they are still
really real. The fact that 2:30 pm is a social construction
and part of a larger cultural set of beliefs emphasizing
order and efficiency doesn't mean you can blow off
your 2:30 pm appointment to protest this set of social
constructions and not face any social consequences.
LEARN MORE
Invisibilia Podcast: How to Become Batman
The Making of Blind Men
by Robert A. Scott
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and
Neurosexism Create Difference, by Cordelia Fine
Skin: A Natural History
by Nina G. Jablonski
Race – The Power of an Illusion, www.pbs.org/race
211

Michael Wesch
212

The Art of Being Human
Challenge Six: Get Uncomfortable
Your challenge is to do at least one hour of fieldwork, immersing
yourself in a cross-cultural or sub-cultural experience – a place, event,
activity that makes you uncomfortable. Do fieldwork and write up a
“thick description” of your experience.
Objective: Experience more, experience difference, and experience
differently – to practice using communication, empathy, and
thoughtfulness to really experience the world from a different cultural
position.
1. Stretch yourself to experience a different cultural or subcultural
reality. For example, if you are atheist, go to church. If you are
Christian, go to a Buddhist retreat. In short, do something you would
probably never otherwise do and open yourself up to the experience.
2. Make sure that it is “cultural” in that it involves engaging and
interacting with people.
3. After the event, write up a “thick description” of your experience.
A thick description is an exquisitely detailed description of the
setting, participants, activities, interactions, and social dramas playing
out that allow the reader to feel ad if they are really there.
Go to ANTH101.com/challenge6 for additional tips and
information.
213

Michael Wesch
Lesson Seven
Superstructure
We fail to examine our assumptions not just because they are hard to
see, but also because they are safe and comfortable. They allow us to
live with the flattering illusion that "I am the center of the universe,
and what matters are my immediate needs and desires."
214

The Art of Being Human
BIG QUESTIONS ABOUT MORALITY
The ideal marriage among the Sumbanese of Indonesia is for a
woman to marry her father's sister's son, and for a man to marry his
mother's brother's daughter. Like the marriages among the Tamil,
these cousin marriages are arranged by elders and thought to be far
too important to be left up to individual choice. These marriages
create alliances between clans which are further reinforced through
ceremonies involving an elaborate exchange of valuables such as
horses, pigs, ivory, and gold. For the Sumbanese, this is simply the
right thing to do.
One day, the anthropologist Web Keane was discussing these
matters with an elder Sumbanese woman when she turned the tables
and asked him about American marriage practices. Keane told her
that individuals choose their own partners, that we rarely or never
marry cousins but otherwise there are no rules, and that we do not
host an elaborate exchange of goods like the Sumbanese. "She was
visibly appalled," Keane notes. With a sense of shock she exclaimed,
"So Americans just mate like animals!"
215

Michael Wesch
On the surface, this story is a reminder of the vast differences
between us. Our cultures seem to encapsulate very different morals,
ethics, and values. Marriage practices are just one expression of what
at root seem to be vastly different ideas and ideals. The American
marriage system rests on ideals of individualism, freedom, liberty, and
choice. If we really stop to imagine a young girl marrying her cousin
at the behest of her elders, we can't help but feel as appalled as the
Sumbanese woman above. The Sumbanese system seems to be
denying her most fundamental right to live a free life, fall in love, and
pursue happiness under her own terms. But beneath the surface we
might also perceive a few important similarities. First, both
systems are supported by moral and ethical values. Americans may
disagree on the specifics of the ethical system, but we recognize it as
an ethical system and understand the value of such constraints. We
might even agree with the sentiment that, as Keane summarizes it,
"being ethical makes you human."
The problem of different morals and ethics raises some
challenging questions. As noted earlier, great questions can take us further
than we ever thought possible. But questions can be disconcerting too,
especially those that might lead us to question our moral and ethical
foundations. Are there universal principles of right and wrong?
Where does our morality come from? Does it have natural or divine
origins? Are we born with a sense of morality or do we learn it? The
implications of how we answer these questions will impact everything
about how we live and find meaning and purpose in life. The stakes
are high.
Morality provides many benefits to human societies. They keep
people in line and allow us to live in relative peace and harmony.
They can provide a sense of direction, meaning, and purpose. And
they often put us in accord with the natural world around us as well,
providing rules and directions for how to treat the world and the
other creatures with whom we live.
But morality can also drive us apart. Many of the most intense
conflicts and wars stem from real or perceived moral differences.
216

The Art of Being Human
Even within a single culture there can be virulent conflict over moral
principles. As I write these words there are several protests planned
in America today in the ongoing battles that have been dubbed the
"culture wars." The culture wars pit ardent conservatives against
progressive liberals on issues of abortion, women's rights, LGBTQ
rights, free speech, political correctness, racial inequalities, global
warming, and immigration, among many others. Over the past few
years, the culture wars have become even more explosive, with
protests and counter-protests often erupting into violence.
In the midst of these conflicts there is a growing sense that we
simply cannot talk or have a civil discussion anymore. We live in
different media worlds inside the filter bubbles created by social
media. One person's facts are another's "alt-facts." Is there any hope
to find common ground?
In this lesson, we will be exploring the roots and many
flourishing branches of morality, but ultimately our goal will be to use
the anthropological perspective to try to see our own seeing, see big,
and see small, so that we can "see it all" – see and understand our
own moral foundations as well as those of others in hopes that we
can have productive conversations with people who see the world
differently. To do this, we will have to open ourselves up to the
anthropological method to experience more (other moral ideas and
systems), experience difference (by truly understanding the roots and
foundations of those systems), and experience differently (by
allowing ourselves to imagine our way into a new way of thinking, if
only temporarily, to truly understand a different point of view).
IS THERE A UNIVERSAL MORALITY?
Imagine the following dilemma: A woman is dying and there is
only one drug that can save her life. The druggist paid $200 for the
materials and charges $2,000 for the drug. The woman's husband,
Heinz, asked everyone he knows for money but could only collect
$1,000. He offered this to the druggist but the druggist refused.
217

Michael Wesch
Desperate, Heinz broke into the lab and stole the drug for his wife.
Should he have done this?
This is the famous Heinz dilemma, created by Lawrence
Kohlberg to analyze how people think through a moral dilemma.
Kohlberg was not interested in whether or not people thought Heinz
acted morally. He wanted to know how they justified their answer.
From their responses he was able to construct a six-stage theory of
moral development proposing that over the course of a lifetime,
people move from a "pre-conventional" self-centered morality based
on obedience or self-interest to a more "conventional" grouporiented
morality in which they value conformity to rules and the
importance of law and order. Some people move past this
"conventional" morality to a "post-conventional" humanistic morality
based on human rights and universal human ethics.
Kohlberg proposed that these are universal stages of moral
judgment that anyone in any culture may go through, but still allowed
for a wide range of cultural variation in the group-oriented
conventional stages based on local rules, customs, and laws. His postconventional
stages represent a universal morality but only a very few
people can see their way past their own cultural conventions to see
and act on them. In his studies, just 2% of people responded in a way
that reflected a model of morality based on universal human ethics,
and in practice he reserved the highest stage of moral development to
moral luminaries like Gandhi and Mother Theresa.
However, some saw Kohlberg's "universal" morality as biased
toward a very specific model of morality that was culturally and
politically biased in favor of liberal American values. By placing this
"humanistic morality" as beyond and more developed than morality
based on conformity or law and order he was placing his own cultural
values at the pinnacle of human moral achievement. Kohlberg's
stage-theory model provided justification for a liberal secular
worldview that championed questioning authority and egalitarianism
as more advanced and developed than religiously-based moral
worldviews that valued authority and tradition.
218

The Art of Being Human
Then Kohlberg's former student Elliot Turiel discovered that
children as young as five often responded as "conventional" in some
contexts but "post-conventional" in others. When children were
asked whether or not it was okay to wear regular clothes to a school
that requires school uniforms, kids said no, except in cases in which
the teacher allowed it. The kids recognized that these rules were
based on social conventions. But if you asked them if it was okay if a
girl pushed a boy off a swing, the kids said no, and held to that
answer even in cases in which the teacher allowed it or there were
explicitly no rules against it. In this case, the kids were not basing
their moral reasoning on social conventions. Turiel suggested that
these were moral rules, not conventional rules, and moral rules were
based on a universal moral truth: harm is wrong.
This moral truth discovered by Turiel as he analyzed the
discourse of children reflects the wisdom of "The Golden Rule,"
which is found in religious traditions all over the world. The words of
Jesus ("Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.") are
echoed in the Analects of Confucius ("Do not do to others what you
do not want them to do to you."), the Udana-Varga of Buddhism
("Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.") and
the Hadiths of Islam ("None of you truly believes until he wishes for
his brother what he wishes for himself."), as well as many others. But
evidence of a universal human morality might go beyond what is
written in our texts. It might be written in our DNA.
THE NATURE OF HUMAN NATURE
Two dominant theories of human nature have been debated for
centuries. One suggests that we are inherently good, peaceful,
cooperative, empathic and nurturing. The other argues that we are
inherently evil, violent, competitive, and selfish. In the 17 th Century,
Thomas Hobbes argued that our societies are composed of selfish
individuals and that without a strong social contract enforced by
government we would be engaged in a "war of all against all," that we
219

Michael Wesch
would be unable to cooperate to build technologies, institutions, and
knowledge, and that ultimately our lives would be "solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short." Against this conception stood Jean-Jacques
Rousseau with his image of the Noble Savage living in accord with
nature in peaceful and egalitarian communities beyond the corruption
of power and society.
Many early popular anthropological accounts of indigenous
people aligned with Rousseau's vision. Countering popular
stereotypes of violent "savages," work such as that of Margaret Mead
and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas portrayed indigenous people like the
!Kung San as "The Harmless People" – hunter-gatherers living
peaceful lives despite the absence of formal laws and governments.
However, over the past few decades anthropologists have
acquired more detailed statistics on these groups, and the rates of
violent death among hunter-gatherers appears much higher than what
we find in large state-based societies, even when massive atrocities
like the World Wars are taken into account. Violent death rates
among males of the Jivaro and Yanomamo have been reported to be
over 45%. Adding more data to the side that humans are inherently
violent, anthropologist Carol Ember estimated that 64 percent of
hunter-gatherer societies are either in a war or will be in one within
the next two years. Under the weight of this evidence, linguist Steven
Pinker declared that the "doctrine of the Noble Savage" had been
"mercilessly debunked."
But proponents of a better human nature note that just because
we are naturally aggressive does not mean that we do not also have
other important traits. Looking to our closest primate ancestors we
find ample evidence of violent territorial behavior, but primatologist
Franz de Waal sees a softer side as well. After a violent skirmish
among chimpanzees he watched as the two fighters retreated to the
tree tops. Soon one of them held out a hand in the direction of the
other. They slowly moved closer to one another and reconciled with
a hug. He had originally been tasked with studying aggression and
conflict among chimps, but it was clear to him that chimpanzees
220

The Art of Being Human
valued their relationships and found ways to repair them when they
were damaged.
In further field observations and lab tests, de Waal pieced
together a vast array of evidence suggesting that primates exhibit two
pillars upon which a more complex human morality can be built:
empathy and reciprocity.
In one simple field test, he showed a looping video of a chimp
yawning to see if chimps experience yawn contagion. Other studies
among humans had shown that yawn contagion correlates with
empathy. When chimps see a video of a chimp they know yawning,
they "yawn like crazy" he says. This mimicry is a basic building block
of empathy, an ability to imagine our way into another's emotions
and perspective.
This perspective-taking is of utmost necessity when cooperating
on complex tasks and we find it not only in primates but other
mammals as well. Chimpanzees and elephants are able to cooperate
on the task of pulling in a food tray to obtain food. And chimpanzees
will cooperate with another chimp even when there is nothing in it
for them, showing that these actions go beyond mere selfishness.
In another study they let a chimpanzee purchase food with
tokens. If the chimp paid with a red token, only they got food. If they
paid with a green token, both the chimp and another chimp next
door received food. If chimps were purely selfish, we would expect
random selection of tokens, so that over time 50% would be red and
50% would be green. However, chimps tend to make prosocial
choices by selecting the green token that fed the other chimp as well.
These pro-social tendencies extend into more elaborate notions
of fairness as well. In a study of capuchin monkeys one monkey was
paid in cucumber and the other in grapes. By the second round of
payments the first monkey was furious and demanded fairness,
throwing the cucumber back at the researcher and demanding the
grape. Among chimpanzees the same test elicited even more complex
behavior. The chimp receiving the grapes refused grapes until the
other chimp also received grapes.
221

Michael Wesch
For decades, de Waal found himself struggling against a strong
consensus among scientists that deep down, humans are violent,
cruel, aggressive, and selfish. They proposed that only a thin veneer
of human-made morality kept the world from falling apart. But his
work was leading him somewhere else. Each experiment revealed that
our evolutionary history had placed deep within us the capacity for
empathy, cooperation, reconciliation, and a sense of fairness. "Our
brains have been designed to blur the line between self and other," de
Waal noted on our capacity for empathy. "It is an ancient neural
circuitry that marks every mammal, from mouse to elephant."
De Waal seemed to be confirming Turiel's findings. Turiel had
found a basic universal morality in five-year-old children that showed
that we place an innate value on fairness and see harm to others as
inherently wrong. De Waal now found this same basic morality
among monkeys and apes, suggesting that the foundations of our
morality run very deep in our biology and evolutionary history.
THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL VARIATION
Despite these apparent universals in the domains of harm and
fairness, anthropologists did not need to look far to see a vast array
of different moral standards reflected in the beliefs, practices, taboos,
and rituals around the world. Aside from the most titillating accounts
of human sacrifice, head-hunting, and ritualized cannibalism were
many others that defied categorization into a simple scheme that
placed principles of harm and fairness as the two pillars of morality.
In the 1980s, anthropologist Richard Shweder started working
with Turiel to examine the cross-cultural evidence for a universal
morality. Together, they determined that there was simply not
enough evidence yet. They recognized that the five-year-olds may
have simply picked up the principles of fairness and harm through
socialization. They needed a more thorough study of moral
development in other cultures to determine if these moral principles
were made by nature or culture.
222

The Art of Being Human
Shweder knew a great way to get started. He had done extensive
fieldwork in the Hindu temple town of Bhubaneswar in India. As he
describes it, it is
"...a place where marriages are arranged, not matters of 'love' or free
choice, where, at least among Brahman families, widows may not
remarry or wear colored clothing or ornaments or jewelry; where
Untouchables are not allowed in the temple; where menstruating women
may not sleep in the same bed as their husbands or enter the kitchen or
touch their children; where ancestral spirits are fed on a daily basis;
where husband and wives do not eat together and the communal family
meals we find so important rarely occur; where women avoid their
husbands' elder brothers and men avoid their wives' elder sisters, where,
with the exception of holy men, corpses are cremated, never buried, and